


Degrees Don't Help in a Gunfight

by KogoDogo



Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 4
Genre: Abuse, Broken Bones, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, F/M, Gunshot Wounds, Personal Canon, Personal Growth, Psychological Trauma, Recreational Drug Use
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-06-26
Updated: 2020-05-09
Packaged: 2020-05-19 23:24:17
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 12
Words: 24,755
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19365811
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KogoDogo/pseuds/KogoDogo
Summary: Her husband is dead. Her son is missing. She doesn't know how to fire a gun, and all the wildlife is much larger and more hostile than she remembers. It was a miracle she made it to Boston, and a miracle that the raider boss known as "Behemoth" didn't shoot her dead as soon as she set foot on his turf. But, for how woefully ill-equipped she is to deal with the wasteland, perhaps her wits can help her out in the end. After all, being a defense lawyer made her very good at working well with some very bad people.





	1. Sanctuary

* * *

 

Sanctuary Hills was a shadow of what it had been, but she didn’t feel any shock or horror. All she could feel was the melting ice sloughing off of her body, the chilly October air, and a vague, uncomfortable sensation like electricity and white noise. Everything was so quiet, but made of pure static. There were no words for the anxiety and dread she knew was buried beneath a mound of shock.

Miss Rosa’s house was gone, right down to the foundation, like it had never existed. Others were crumbled heaps of steel frames and aluminum siding, cars trapped under carport rubble or tossed unceremoniously into the street. Once verdant yards were now wastelands of mud, brown, and briars. Trees that had once stood proud and fiery over the neighborhood during the autumn were now bare and desperate, brittle limbs clawing at the sky. It wasn’t the seasonal cold that had robbed them of their beauty.

But, at the same time, Cassandra couldn’t process why everything was the way it was. It was a nightmare, or an illusion, or maybe there was secretly an explanation beyond the fact that the Chinese had actually, honestly dropped a bomb. She told herself that it was only so quiet because people were hiding and not because everyone was dead or displaced. That even though it was horrible where she was standing in the middle of the broken street, that somewhere out there, the warheads hadn’t hit. Everyone might have just moved. There was greenery somewhere.

Maybe that’s where her son was.

She wrung her hands, twisting her wedding ring around and around as she approached what was left of her house. Her prized flowers had survived, somehow, but were brown and twisting and would never blossom again. Piles of leaves obscured a welcome mat that her mother-in-law had bought as a housewarming gift when she and her husband had moved to Massachusetts. The door was still a jaunty red, standing proud and tall in a frame that was only barely intact.

The car had been ripped clean out of the driveway. Her mailbox was a rusted heap that wouldn’t open. She could see the destroyed frame of her marital bed through a hole in the wall of the master bedroom, just like she could see across the hall to a dusty, burned room that she had painstakingly painted while pregnant to prepare for a newborn. 

The severity of the situation began to sink in little by little and Cassandra froze, feeling her breath catch in her throat. Her lungs ached and her brain snapped to attention, whispering quietly that _maybe_ something was wrong after all. A familiar tingle began behind her eyes but she fought against it, attempting to force the denial to last long enough to take her first step inside. Daylight dappled the interior of her home’s carcass, bleeding in through massive gaps in the roof, spotlighting destroyed remnants of her past life.

But her husband wasn’t dead. The bomb hadn’t dropped. Everyone was somewhere. This was not her home.

The floor creaked--it never creaked--and the wind whistled through cracks in the siding. The side door was gone but the bright blue bowl for her husband’s missing dog was still nestled next to it, somehow. Her heart sank through her stomach as she thought of him, cold and alone out in the middle of nowhere when the bomb came crashing down like divine fury. She thought of the skeletons she passed on the way home and realized, with some horror, that the dog wasn’t the only frightened, confused creature caught in the blast.

But the bomb wasn’t real. None of this was real. She’d wake up and her husband would be next to her. Her son would be in the other room.

It was disorienting and surreal to see the second-hand couch she’d had since college somehow look worse than it had before. The color had been bleached clean out of it, soot and dirt caked to the sides as though it’d been dragged out of a hole in the ground. Light fixtures dangled precariously from the ceiling, creaking in the breeze, and the back of her kitchen chairs had fallen clean off. Tiles had been uprooted so that all she could see was grout and grime, but the note she had left for her husband was still taped to the refrigerator door, reminding him of what to pick up from a grocery store that probably no longer existed.

Milk. Eggs. Et cetera.

Her stomach growled, but the only thing left in the entire kitchen was an empty milk bottle, salisbury steak that reeked of death, and the terrifying coffee tin with the soulless child on the front that her sister had won in a Fancy Lads sweepstakes. Neither of them had been able to look at it for too long without feeling like something bad would happen, and Cassandra instinctively turned it to face the corner between the wall and the side of the fridge.

The floor was still creaking. Floating like a ghost of the past and shivering in the autumn chill, she began her painful rounds, noticing small things like her law degree being gone but her husband’s flag still being present. The paint on the pictures she’d had hanging in the hallway--gifts from her brother-in-law, who was too talented for his own good--had flaked away in the invisible fires and the canvases smelled like smoke. It was almost funny how the frames still hung proudly on their nails, as though they still had anything to offer.

Actually, a lot of it was funny, in a sad way. The silver hairbrush she’d inherited from her great-grandmother was gone, but the packaging for her Mr. Handy was still in the laundry room. Her jewelry box was long since missing, but the tacky rug that her husband had _insisted_ matched their bedroom was still under the collapsed frame of the bed. Only the frame, though, because somebody had already nicked the mattress. Who knew where it could have ended up?

When she hit the door for the playroom, she froze. Denial threatened to slip once again and she struggled to remain in blissful doubt while she examined the wall, the sliding door so far jammed into the frame that it was essentially lost forever. She tried to pretend it was much more interesting than the adorable blue, rocket-patterned carpet that her husband had picked out, or the fallen shelves and scattered toys on the ground. The biggest hurdle was trying to pretend that she didn’t see his crib out of  the corner of her eye, rocket mobile still dangling lopsided above. 

But her son wasn’t missing. Her husband wasn’t dead. None of it was real.

But the picture book on the ground was. While trying to avert her gaze, she’d seen it peeking out from beneath a corner of torn carpet like somebody had tried to hide it away for later. The colors were still the same glossy pastel they’d been when it had been purchased from the Super Duper Mart in Lexington, after rolling her eyes at her husband about how silly it’d seemed when he tossed it in their cart. 

Cassandra picked it up. She stared at it. Time stopped and her lungs ached as she forgot to breathe. Gears began turning and the sun was sinking in the sky, everything looking as though it had been set on fire by God himself. Tears beaded at the corners of her eyes and her mouth went dry, memories popping into her mind one after another like a nonsensical slideshow.

She’d woken up. The Mr. Handy had served her coffee. The baby cried. Her husband wanted to go to the park. She didn’t. The news cut out. Everyone was screaming. The mushroom cloud erupted where she’d cut her teeth as a paralegal. The doctor in the vault had lied. It wasn’t a decontamination area, it was a freezer, and she hadn’t even told her family she loved them before she slipped into her vault suit and climbed into the pod.

The bald man, with the scar, wearing clothes like he’d climbed out of a comic book. 

He’d shot Nate. He’d stolen Shaun.

This was real.

“Mum?”

A familiar voice called from the living room, just like it had the day that she’d come from the playroom to find a nervous news anchor spending his last moments on earth panicking about a nuclear attack. She clutched the book to her chest and hesitated.

“Mum, is that you in there?”

Suddenly, she could smell the fuel. She could hear the jets. She stood, wide-eyed and secretly wishing she was wrong, terrified to look a piece of yesterday in the face and see what the reds had done to it. Half-trembling, she remained silent as her Mr. Handy rounded the corner, surprisingly intact but rusted and scarred. His robotic eyes struggled to focus on her as he hovered lazily in the air between her and freedom.

“Mum! There you are! I thought I saw you come in while I was tending the gardenias!”

He paused. There was an uneasy silence between them.

“... Mum, where is sir and young Shaun?”

Cassandra began to cry.


	2. Behemoth

The caravan guard was about to piss himself. 

After the fall his leg had to be broken, and he trembled as he struggled to drag himself backwards down a dead-end alley that he hadn’t yet realized was a trap. Blood and drool dribbled down the corners of his mouth as he gaped, wide-eyed, at the towering wall of a man that slowly walked after him. The poor bastard probably thought that his pursuer was taking joy in the hunt but, behind his dented metal gasmask, Behemoth couldn’t bring himself to smile.

He loaded his shotgun. The guard hit the chain link that blocked him from an escape, muttering prayers and profanity beneath heaving breaths. Somewhere between attempts to call down Jesus to save his soul and promising Behemoth that he’d burn in hell, he attempted to bargain with the two-bit junk he had in his pockets, offering bullshit like copper wire scraps and half-eaten snacks in exchange for freedom. In a way, Behemoth found it sad that a man who risked his life to protect the most prosperous wastelanders in the Commonwealth wouldn’t have two caps to rub together to buy himself out of a jam, but that was the whole reason Behemoth did what he did, wasn’t it?

He needed the money. Nobody was going to give it to him if he didn’t take it.

“You don’t have to do this,” his victim pleaded. His lame leg dangled out in front of him, bent awkwardly and already beginning to swell. It was impressive that he’d managed to scoot as far as he had, though Behemoth hadn’t really taken the time to put him out of his misery. A small part of him was debating whether or not he wanted to let this one go.

Behemoth cocked his gun and raised it, barrel pointing dead at the now-screaming guard. A foul-smelling puddle formed around him as his pleas turned into threats and screams vowing revenge. Tears and snot stained his face as he slammed his palms into the ground, his voice reaching dizzying heights. Howls became wails as he told Behemoth, desperately, that he had a family waiting for him and a little boy who would spend the rest of his life never knowing what happened to his daddy if he wound up pumped full of lead.

He begged Behemoth to have a heart, that he _knew_ there was still something human behind his helmet, something that could understand where he was coming from. When he finally shrieked himself into exhaustion, eyes almost as red as his face, Behemoth lowered his gun for a moment. An uneasy silence fell between them, the tension so thick that it would have taken a meat cleaver to slice through. 

What he wanted to say, but couldn’t, was that he was right. There _was_ something human hidden under all that armor, something that had once spawned another little human that he had loved more than life itself. 

She liked radio dramas, listening to the old reruns of the Silver Shroud _ad nauseum_ to the point that he could recite the scripts verbatim. She collected stuffed animals she found in the dumpsters around the apartment building where his crew holed up, and he and his wife had brought back piles of intact bears and dolls to add to the collection. Even though both of her parents were heartless raider scumbags, she seemed so happy to be with them and the crew and he used to laugh at the change among his men whenever his little princess entered the room. She owned it, they loved her, and he’d have it no other way.

He loved his daughter, and his wife. He loved them so much that when he came back from a raid to find half his men dead, he’d only thought about them. He loved them so much that when he found his wife, raped and murdered on the shitty mattress in their shitty room in their fucked-up hideout, he burned the mattress and spent more than a few days locked in said room questioning whether or not to follow her. He loved them so goddamn much that, when he found out that Gunners were responsible, his daughter was probably alive, and they had sold her into slavery, that he had decided to funnel every bit of ill-gotten gain toward his quest of burning their headquarters to the ground and rooting out the punk-ass sicko who bought his little Gloria. 

He wanted to tell this to the caravan guard. However, the unspoken rules of being a raider kept his mouth shut, knowing that any perceived sign of weakness would be one that his enemies and his men would smell like blood in the water. If he wanted to stay in one piece long enough to save the one thing in his life that meant more to him than power and caps, he couldn’t lower his guard. Behemoth could never falter.

Gripping his gun tightly, he let out a heavy sigh. The caravan guard flinched.

“You have a son, huh?” he asked. 

“I-I do, man. His name is--”

“Do you love him?”

“I, uh… I mean, why wouldn’t I? O-of course I d--”

“Then, as a parent, you’ll understand.”

Shotgun gleaming in the dying light, Behemoth leveled it square at the guard’s head and placed a finger on the trigger. At least, if nothing else, he could make sure the guy didn’t suffer.

“I have a little girl. And I love her a lot more than I give a fuck about you.”

The guard’s eyes grew wide and then, with a boom, they were gone. His skull lay in pieces beside him, his broken body slumping back against the chain link fence that wobbled and creaked with the dead weight. Wordlessly, Behemoth settled in the blood and sinew and began to rifle through his pockets and pouches, his satchel and clothes. There were cigarettes hidden in his boots, a box worth of bobby pins, and some subway tokens from a line he hadn’t heard of in the Commonwealth. He supposed they could likely be traded for caps with somebody.

Most surprisingly, he found a gun. Small, made of pipe and ingenuity, but modded to be almost identical to a revolver. To beat all, it was loaded. The man had just forgotten it existed or, maybe, he wanted to die.

There wasn’t any time for questions, though, as he gathered up what ill-gotten gain he could and stuffed it in his own pockets. Shouldering his gun, he took one glimpse back at the shattered remains of the man he’d just slaughtered, with a mixture of curiosity and shame.

He wished he could have told that man’s son what happened to his daddy, but more than anything, he wished he knew how much his leather jacket was worth so he’d have a little more to put into the fund to bring his baby home.


	3. Chapter 3

Shaun wasn’t in Sanctuary Hills. Nobody was. All she had found were some terrifyingly oversized flies, a few skeletons crammed in odd places, and a half dozen gold bars in Mr. Jahani’s basement that didn’t seem like they’d have much in the way of value anymore. The only resident that Sanctuary Hills knew was her robot, Codsworth, who maintained that he’d waited several lifetimes for his family to return home. She didn’t believe him--something had to have been wrong with his internal clock--but she humored him the best she could.

She did believe his conviction that Shaun was alive, though. Or rather, she felt like she had to in order to keep herself from losing her mind. With Nate dead and the world having ended, the idea that her son was okay and waiting for her was all she had to keep herself going. The thought of blowing her own brains out was becoming more tempting with every passing minute.

But if she was dead, who would save her son? She had no choice but to keep on.

Codsworth had suggested starting in Concord, and she’d begun her journey with all the conviction that a desperate mother could muster. She teetered across the collapsing bridge that connected Sanctuary Hills to the rest of the world and struggled not to pay attention to the half-decayed body and mangled dog laying in the middle of the street. She didn’t look into the cracked windows of the crashed cars piled on the side of the road to check for remains and marched stoically past the Red Rocket gas station that, while familiar, seemed foreign and skeletal. It was piled high with garbage and leaves and junked cars and old tires, and through the open garage she could see workbenches and furniture that she knew hadn’t been there before.

At least it was confirmation that she wasn’t alone in the world, though she wasn’t sure if that made her feel better or worse. At least when it was just her and Codsworth and the phantom of Shaun, she felt safe. Things seemed predictable. Seeing evidence that there had been strangers around made her stomach lurch. She couldn’t even begin to think of what scarcity and desperation had driven the people of Massachusetts to become.

It was that fear that made her stop at Concord city limits. She stood on the stoop of an old two-story that had once belonged to a sweet middle-aged couple, listening as an ominous popping sound echoed through the streets. The bustle of Concord was replaced with screaming threats that were too distorted to understand from such a distance, but they were unmistakably hostile and punctuated with gunfire. Cassandra trembled as she listened, twisting her wedding band round and round as the sounds of war crept uncomfortably close. When a flock of crows exploded from the rooftop of the obliterated general store, she finally decided that her law degree wouldn’t do much to protect her from getting shot.

Back to the Red Rocket she went, albeit begrudgingly, where she sat huddled behind the register with her knees to her chest and her eyes locked on the wall. The gunshots never grew closer, thankfully, which left her with nothing but the buzz of fluorescent lights to keep her company as she fiddled with the Pip Boy she’d stolen from the vault upon her escape. 

It had a dial for a radio but she was hesitant to try it. All she could think of was what the noise would attract if it worked, and if it did work, what horrible things she would hear. An eternal siren sounding over the stations she associated with date nights and her morning commute, she feared, would be the straw that broke the camel’s back.

So, she sat in silence with her memories. And her fear. And her self-loathing and grief and denial. All of them mixed into something malicious that stewed in the back of her mind, mocking her with reminders of all the people and things she’d never experience again. They whispered horrible little nothings, promised her everything she couldn’t have, and never hesitated to remind her that it was  _ her _ that should have wound up dead. Her eyes watered as she weaved her fingers into her hair and let out a pitiful whimper, anger and terror and desperation roiling violently in her gut.

Again and again, the morning played out in her head: Shower, Codsworth, Coffee, Shaun. Shower, Codsworth, Coffee, Shaun. Shower, Codsworth, Coffee, Shaun. Bombs. Panic. Vault. Gunshots. Nate. 

Bombs.  _ Bombs _ .  **_Bombs_ ** .

A loud sob escaped her, coming out as a choked hiccup as she slumped further into the floor. Codsworth had said it had been two hundred years since she was locked away in a vault, frozen like last week’s leftovers, and forgotten by Vault-Tec and a dead society. The world had not yet recovered, probably never would, and in fact had bred people so vile that they would murder her husband, steal her son, and leave her as… what?

What had that stranger called her? “The spare?” What the hell was that even supposed to mean?

Just thinking about his voice, a low and dangerous grumble, made her furious. The man looked like something out of a half-bit movie, bald and scarred and dressed in leather and steel, and he walked like he thought he was the most important person to ever draw breath. Just remembering the way he leaned against her cryopod and taunted her through the glass made her sick to her stomach. 

A strange heat began to spread across her body as the anger began to slowly eat away at the pity and grief, her brain so jumbled that she honestly couldn’t make sense of her emotions beyond the fact that they were incredibly intense. Infuriatingly intense, actually. So much so that her small frame didn’t seem big enough to house them. In a way, she felt like she wanted to tear her skin off just to give them a way to bleed out, but instead she settled for clenching her fists so hard that her nails made her palms bleed.

In an instant, she was on her feet. A loud cry of distress and rage escaped her as she grabbed the closest thing to her and hurled it as far as she could. A burnt magazine with the faded logo of Colonial Living fluttered helplessly in the air before slapping awkwardly against the tile floor. Unsatisfied, she picked up a dirty, empty soda bottle and chucked it as hard as she could into the wall. It exploded into diamond shards, but still wasn’t enough.

The register, still full of money that she doubted had value anymore, clattered to the ground. Cabinets were thrown open and tools scattered to the winds. Posters for Giddy-Up Buttercup and Sugar Bombs were ripped down from the walls, hollow reminders of a life she could never go back to. A rack of wrenches was yanked to the ground, cardboard boxes of rotted papers slamming into the walls. Filing cabinet drawers were violently removed from their tracks and spread to the far corners of the gas station interior.

Sweat beading at her brow, eyes filled with tears, she let out an animalistic howl of pure…  _ something _ . The feeling itself was impossible to describe but exhausting and horrible, stripping away her humanity, if only for a second. Once the last note left her mouth, she was left to stand there, cold and alone, in the middle of the cracked linoleum floor with her bleeding palms and snot and tears smearing make-up she’d put on the morning before the war ended for good.

Her pulse was so loud in her ears that, for a second, she didn’t hear the sound of earth shifting. She didn’t notice a thing until, in her periphery, she saw a pile of dead leaves rustle just outside the broken front windows.

A creature dragged itself out of the ground and litter and shook itself clean in the dying sun; it was covered in dirt, the size of her dog, and impossibly ugly. Its body was hairless, wrinkled, and covered in sores, and its whiskers twitched as it turned to face her. Tiny eyes grew wide once it registered her presence and its face contorted into an almost human-like expression of disgust. Prying open teeth that barely fit in its mouth, it let out a horrible sound that was half hiss, half squall and retreated back to its tunnel with cartoonish agility. She watched the earth shift as it began to frantically burrow its way towards her.

As she feared, sound had attracted something terrible.

From every direction, she heard other shrieks and realized the severity of the situation. Sound, vibration, whatever; something had attracted them, a  _ horde _ of them, and she was a sitting duck in the middle of nowhere with nothing to protect herself. She remembered the guns she’d seen in the vault on her way out and scolded herself for being too distracted to think logically, not that she had any training with firearms beyond a couple of days out at the range. At least she would have had a fighting chance.

One of the creatures burst out of the ground and lunged at her, clearing feet of tile as it launched itself through an open doorway. Instinct drove her as she hauled back and landed a punch clear in its disgusting little face, sandpaper skin brushing across her knuckles as something popped loudly in her hand. She let out a cry of pain as the monster hit the floor and rolled to its feet, scrambling to attack as its friends rained in from every corner.

Teeth grazed her arm, cutting straight through the leather of her vault suit. Tiny claws dug into her leg and she responded with a swift kick that knocked the surprisingly light creature flying. Cradling her hand and terrified, she broke away just as one made a beeline for her knees. Obviously, they’d taken down large prey before and had learned how to work around the size difference.

Originally, she barreled towards Concord as the pudgy rat-beasts toddled after her with surprising speed. When the sound of gunfire became too loud, she veered to the south and raced into the wilderness. The trees were barely existent, the grass patchy, tan, and dead, and the rats tore through the briar bushes with ease as she struggled to navigate the unlevel, rocky land.

After what seemed like an eternity of sprinting, the creatures seemed to stop. She couldn’t hear their claws, their chittering, or the ground shifting beneath her feet. Nerves kept her going, though, stumbling down hills and tripping over herself as she tried to keep an eye out for anything familiar or safe. All she found was garbage and refuse, burning tires, and train cars on rails that had long ago been reclaimed by what little nature was left. The sun faded and stars began to dot the sky when she caught sight of painted asphalt and rusted guard rails. Bleeding and sobbing, she wobbled her way to what had once been the road she took to her office in Boston, now piled high with derelict cars and decorated with fissures that made the street look like a mosaic.

Knees weak and hand swelling, she nearly collapsed on the concrete. With the adrenaline fading, it was all she could do to keep herself standing. She stood in the middle of the once busy roadway and looked for any hint of pursuers, her heart in her throat and her mind buzzing with white noise. Once satisfied they were gone, she let out a heaving sob. Her stomach in knots, she struggled to focus enough on her surroundings to figure out where she was.

In the distance, she could see the corpse of Boston. Hollowed-out skyscrapers still hung over a city that looked dimmer than it had before her stasis, the crumbling interstate dangling precariously above the scene as it snaked its way across Massachusetts. Frames of cars, stripped for parts, flanked her on every end but, aside from trash that had built up on the roadsides, there wasn’t a hint of human life. Buildings she knew to pass on her commute were simply gone, obliterated either by the blast or survivors, with the only hint of their presence being the framework of a Red Rocket fuel pump lingering in the shadow of an overpass. Swallowing hard, she took a shaky step in several directions, mind tearing itself apart trying to figure out in which direction she should go.

Concord? Codsworth had said something about there maybe being leads in Concord, but the town where she’d once eaten breakfast on weekends was riddled with angry, armed ruffians from the sounds of it. Boston was promising, being as big as it was and seeming relatively intact from a distance, but if Concord was bad wouldn’t Boston be worse? It wasn’t exactly the safest place even  _ before  _ the bombs. Yet, if she were a cutthroat who’d kill a woman’s husband and kidnap a defenseless infant, Boston would likely be where she holed up. With how sprawling it was compared to the desolation around her, it looked like it had plenty of places to hide.

Cassandra winced as her hand throbbed with pain. Her eyes began to blur with tears. She closed them and tried to pray, but stress and anger made it impossible to form thoughts. It didn’t matter anyway. God was obviously dead.

“Hey!”

A sharp voice, female and older, called out to her and, when Cassandra opened her eyes, she saw a lone figure standing up the sloping street in the direction of Concord. In the dark, her features were hard to make out, but she seemed like a normal enough person even if her voice sounded rough. Her posture was slumped, her hair cut short, and, even in the dark, the blue of her jacket stood out against the dullness of the wasteland. It was the same color as her vault suit.

“Are you okay?” the woman asked. Cassandra hesitated, paralyzed by shock. Her mouth opened and closed like a fish on a dock as she tried desperately to form words. She wanted to ask her where she was, she wanted to ask her if there were any others, she wanted to ask what was going on back in Concord, or even if the woman had seen a bald man with a massive scar and a huge revolver. 

What came out was a scream of alarm when a huge, lumbering shadow emerged from the dark behind the stranger. Four sets of eyes glinted in the moonlight, its hairless body streaked with the same scars and sores as the horrible things that had attacked her at the gas station. Two horned heads swayed as they tried to focus their gaze and, before it could have a chance to strike, Cassandra turned and fled.

Panic made her decision for her. Boston was where she’d start. Logically, that’s where her son would be anyway and hopefully, in the wake of disaster, there’d still be more people there than monsters.


	4. Chapter 4

Axle was one hell of a yes man, even if he was tiring at times. The kid didn’t seem to have an independent thought rattling around in his head and hung onto Behemoth’s every word like it was spun gold. It was probably for the best since such loyalty was hard to come by in the Commonwealth, especially in a raider outfit. Even his second-in-command wouldn’t throw in all of his lots with the boss, always keeping an eye open for any promising opportunity of advancement.

He was just a different breed: young, impressionable, full of ideas, and eager to please. In any other crew he’d probably have been hazed to death or killed once he overstayed his welcome, but Behemoth found him oddly charming. Not a damn one of his men kept their eyes and ears open quite like the kid did, with maybe the exception of their pretty little lookout, whose entire job revolved around doing what Axle did better and of his own accord.

He watched him as he stood beside the partially boarded window, welding goggles lost in his braids and his foot tapping impatiently. Suspicious as it was, he knew that this was normal for Axle. The boy was young, barely an adult, and full of far more energy and drive than the twenty- and thirty-somethings that comprised the bulk of the gang. Whenever anything wasn’t going on, he was a coiled spring waiting for a reason to jump. Longing gazes out the window were as common for him as chem abuse and vodka shots were for the rest of the guys.

“Carla passed through today,” he said, scratching the patchy scruff growing along his jaw. “She said to tell you ‘hello.’”

Behemoth nodded. Bunker Hill paid him a pretty penny to not take shots at their caravans, but he didn’t even have to be reimbursed to spare Carla. The woman was probably the last sane woman left in the entirety of the wasteland and had been good to him before he went crooked. If sainthood were still a thing, he would have nominated her.

“Kitten says that there’s Super Mutants getting uncomfortably close, too. Think we should send Jackdaw and a clean-up crew before they get froggy?”

Sighing, Behemoth slumped further into his chair: a ripped, black loveseat he’d fashioned into a throne. His gaze drifted around the room at the patchwork decorations made of jagged wood, barbed wire, and blood. He wondered if there was anything worth saving if the mutants decided to file in and blow the place to high hell. 

Then again, even if there wasn’t and his empire was built on dirt out of dirt, he supposed inaction would only lead to it being more difficult to bring his daughter home in the long run. Men capable of wresting caps out of the hands of others were hard to come by, at least not without roughing up a few top-dogs in the neighborhood to assert dominance. And the building itself? Well, it’s where his girl was born and reared, tetanus-trap or no. If the whole place was razed, where would Gloria come back to after he put a bullet in her owner’s face?

Rolling his gaze to Axle, he let out a humorless, breathy laugh.

“How close are they?”

“Pretty goddamn close. They started creeping in from the direction of the amphitheater where that weird cult’s been hiding out. Been shooting rockets at traders and came damn close to getting one of our chem runners while you were out on that raid.”

“ _ Supongo que será mejor que hagamos algo entonces, _ ” he mumbled to himself, before arching an eyebrow and gesturing to Axle. “Do you know how many there are?”

“She only saw three, but that’s usually how many they send just to scout a place out, so…”

“Yeah, probably more. Get Jackdaw out there with Reese and the rest.”

“And if Kitten asks to go, too?”

“Fuck no. We need her here. If she has a problem with her job, she can come speak to me directly about it.”

Dutiful as always, Axle sprang into action. Behemoth watched as he practically pranced out of the room--large, leaping bounces like a radstag--and sighed when he heard him call all the way to the other end of the building for Jackdaw to meet him downstairs. 

Slowly, Behemoth sloppily pushed himself to his feet. His back popped in a dozen places and his knee ached horribly, like somebody had taken a tire iron to the back of his leg. Thirty years old and he was already falling apart at the seams, in no small part due to the lifestyle he’d decided to lead. 

It wasn’t as if he had a choice, though. The wasteland was unfair, traders were unfair, life was unfair. There wasn’t enough room out in the Commonwealth for another farmer and mercenary work only led to getting ripped off in the end. Raiding, honestly, was all some people had, especially when their only talent was being large and violent. That or the Gunners and, truth be told, Behemoth wouldn’t touch the Gunners with a ten foot pole.

He was an opportunist. They were psychopaths.

A gloved hand ran through his collapsing mohawk as he let out a ragged sigh and paced out of the room. Moonlight began to filter in through the cracked windows at the end of the hall, pure silver despite the fact the building glowed with hellish orange light. Trash cans full of burning trash sat in front of every other open door, smoke filtering out through gaps in the ceiling and filling the halls with a haunting stench. It was a necessary evil, what with the weather turning frigid. Not like the radiators worked when there wasn’t any running water, though he intended to work on that some day.

Heavy boots thudding on the splintering floor, he watched as the inhabitants of each room dotting the hallway perked up as he passed. A couple of young recruits, one obviously getting his dick sucked, froze like stags in spotlights once they noticed him casually glancing in their direction. More than a couple were holed up on second-hand couches, either passed out drunk or so incredibly high that they hardly knew where they were. A more innocent pack of miscreants sat in another playing low-stakes poker with whatever odds and ends they had on hand. When the obvious winner looked up, face obscured by a dented yellow motocross helmet, he offered Behemoth a polite wave. Behemoth nodded back.

A few floors beneath him, he heard Axle. His voice was the kind that carried well, so it was always easy to pick him out through the thin walls and ratty floors. Jackdaw, however, was a different story, being purposefully loud and aggressive, and it was obvious from his tone that he wasn’t happy to be getting last minute orders from a secondhand source. Groaning, Behemoth questioned whether or not he should intervene to keep them from killing one another though, more than anything, he just wanted to go to bed. The day had been long and draining. His head ached, his body pulsed with pain, and he couldn’t get the image of that caravan guard out of his head.

Halfway down to the floor below, he snapped out of his thoughts when he felt the energy in the air shift. Jackdaw and Axle, usually prone to lengthy arguments, fell silent and, when he looked up the stairwell, he saw a good half dozen heads looking down at him quizzically from behind creaking bannisters. Being as lost as he had been in his own head, it took a few more moments for him to register that somebody was yelling loudly and excitedly in the distance. It was feminine and echoed from the rafters like an emergency siren deep into the night and way down below his feet.

Kitten. She’d seen something. Something  _ good _ .

“Vault dweller! Vault dweller on the street! Vault dweller!”

The army mobilized without his command. The stairs thundered with the footsteps of every individual still sober enough to stand, and soon Behemoth found himself a rock in the middle of a flowing stream of monsters who were excited about the prospect of an easy catch. Vault dwellers, by nature, were soft and naive and far too delicate to put up much of a fight when confronted, yet they never failed to have the most valuable things stuffed in their little knapsacks. Vault 81 to the west was particularly bad for sending woefully unprepared and absolutely loaded runts out into the wild and, as luck would have it, they always had to go through Boston to get to where they needed to be.

Behemoth watched the trickle of raiders disappear below him, followed soon by none other than Kitten herself. Having raced down from her look out, gun in hand, she seemed just as intent on getting in on the action as anyone else. He threw out an arm that nearly clotheslined her.

“Back up top. We don’t need the goddamn military to take out a blue-suit.”

Her brows furrowed and with a huff of indignation, she tried to duck under his arm. When that didn’t work, she bumped him with her gun. When  _ that _ didn’t work, she stomped her foot like a toddler and whined.

“The fuck not, boss? I saw her first.”

“Because you always get emotional about the weak ones. Go back upstairs and watch for mutants.”

“But, boss, I’m never going to harden the fuck up if I don’t--!”

“Which is fine . You don’t need to be hard to be a scout. Go back upstairs.”

“But--!”

“You either go upstairs or I throw you downstairs. You really wanna fuck with me right now?”

She was taken aback but she was a smart enough girl to know when to cut her losses. Being as willful as she was, it wouldn’t have been the first time they had a tangle and he’d yet to be defeated. Deciding not to call him on his bluff, she turned back upstairs and began the slow, stomping trudge of a spoiled child all the way up to where she came from. He watched her silhouette against the moon and firelight until she was just another shadow lurking above.

With a heavy sigh, he continued downstairs. His crew was assembled on the ground floor, a mob of sweaty, unwashed, and hungry animals ready to sink their teeth into whatever hapless sap was waiting outside. They barely acknowledged his presence as he waded through their ranks, passing by Axle and Jackdaw and every other scumfuck he’d accumulated in his near twelve year career busting heads and slitting throats. It was only when he made his way to the front door and picked up his helmet that they chose to pay him any mind.

They stared, almost reverently, as he slid on his armored gas mask. Then, when he had all of their attention, he threw open the door and stepped out into the crisp October night. They poured around him, a flood of greed and death, and began loping down the street like predators. Shouldering his gun and cracking his neck, Behemoth trudged slowly behind them.


	5. Chapter 5

She had no idea how exactly her Pip Boy worked, but she’d figured out enough to know that there was a map, a clock, and a flashlight. The problem was that, with her hand now very obviously broken, navigating the screen and turning the knob went from being a simple task to a Herculean feat. Even the slightest bit of pressure sent searing jolts of pain down her arm and her fingers, now turning purple, had swollen so that she couldn’t even close her fist, let alone fiddle with the finer parts of her new gadget. Moving it to the other arm was out of the question because she couldn’t undo the latch, and most of her time had been spent using her nose and teeth to navigate.

With the fear of being eaten alive by rats and two-headed mutants out of the way, she had managed to be a bit more productive at least. The dark was terrifying and every noise made her jump, but she had a vague idea of where she was and where she was going. As long as she didn’t overthink the fact the green glow of the Pip Boy light was attracting unwanted attention, she could keep herself fairly composed. Landmarks were plenty, the map was clear, and there was actual evidence of human life scattered around here and there.

Things like recently used wrappers, sleeping bags in garages, clean tool boxes sitting near busted storefronts, and one live, healthy cat with a little pink food bowl who was taking a nap near the bakery where she used to buy birthday cakes. The latter was the most promising and calming of all. People still kept pets, cats weren’t extinct, and a piece of her past was still relevant.

Breath shaking from a mixture of nerves and cold, she slogged through an ankle-deep pile of loose rubble and gazed up at the skeletal frames of the towers that’d once amazed her. They looked like defeated titans, chunks torn from their bodies as they still struggled to stand, portions sloughed away as though afflicted with some horrible disease. They still retained their color, making the ruins of the city she loved look mockingly jovial.

Closer to the ground, the streets were a disaster. Everything that had fallen had piled up to the point that most of the roads weren’t visible for the debris. Metal beams and crushed cars blocked alleys and footpaths, though shifting earth and the passage of time had thankfully opened up alternate routes. Most of them were through buildings, which she tiptoed through quietly and worriedly. Half of it was fear of there being something in the dark but the rest was just the nagging feeling that she was trespassing.

Aching and tired, she watched the clock on the Pip Boy strike two in the morning. She knew it took nearly an hour to drive to work from Sanctuary during the rush hour crunch, and she didn’t even want to think about how long that would translate to being on foot. She’d started keeping track around midnight after she’d been at it for what felt like an eternity, so she knew it was more than she’d ever imagined she’d be able to manage. Before now, her peak of fitness was taking walks around the neighborhood every morning.

As time trudged on, however, exhaustion began to win. While maneuvering through a building that was ruined to the point of being unrecognizable, her legs finally turned to jelly beneath her. She settled on an uncomfortable pile of bricks and panted as the cold night burned her lungs and sweat poured down her face. Sopping, smelly hair fell in front of her eyes as she stared blankly at her feet and her hand, emotionally numb and physically aching.

“Still better than my internship,” she muttered beneath her breath in a sarcastic singsong. 

She sputtered a laugh. It was forced but it made her feel like a person again. It was the kind of joke her husband would have made, or maybe the kind of thing she’d say during a horrible holiday with family that would make him snort into his drink.

Just as a smile threatened to cross her lips, something changed in the air. A sixth sense, like an electric current, shocked her into looking up. Everything was silent and still, but ever so slightly  _ off _ . Holding her breath, she raised her Pip Boy to her face and clicked off the flashlight with her teeth, slowly clambering to her tired feet and taking a few tentative steps backwards.

That’s when she heard it: footsteps.  _ Everywhere _ . Her brows furrowed as she swung around in a panic, scanning the darkness for any sign of movement. She saw nothing. Whoever it was, they were ghosts.

Then she heard clicks.  _ Everywhere _ . She knew the sound despite her inexperience due to her husband dragging her to the shooting range once or twice. The phantoms were armed and they had her surrounded.

Somebody giggled. The noise came from nowhere. They sounded inebriated or insane. Cassandra yelped in alarm and mustered what was left of her energy to try to sprint away, but she didn’t make it far before something stopped her by force.

Fingers curled under her chin and squeezed her throat, and in the faintest sliver of light from the moon she could make out the features of the strong-armed lowlife that was choking her. He was young with dark skin, handsome but dirty, with a head full of long, complicated braids that fell around his face like vines. There was no human emotion on his face, his eyes cold and calculating as he eyed her up and down like a show horse. His gaze lingered on her Pip Boy and suddenly, as a menacing smile blossomed across his face, she began to see other figures bleed in from the blackness.

Men. Women. All of them were dressed bizarrely in leather straps, scraps of metal, and random odds and ends she associated with more mundane professions. Umpire masks were fashioned into weird pauldrons, military helmets obscured entire faces, pilot goggles dangled around necks, and most of their clothing was in tatters. She could see very little in the dark, mostly the gleam of steel and the reflection of sweat, but enough to know these were desperate, vicious people as they closed in like a clan of hyenas, snickering and hungry.

“Look what we found,” the kid holding her purred. “Kitten was right.”

“She doesn’t have a bag,” another protested. “Where the fuck’s she carrying the goods?”

“Her gadget’s enough of a good,” a woman in the back snapped. “Let’s hurry up and get this over with.”

Cassandra struggled but couldn’t break herself free. Her breaths came out in tiny wheezes as she felt herself being walked backwards, the crowd of phantoms following her as her head went fuzzy and her eyes grew blurry. Gasping and writhing, she flailed her arms at her assailants while they enthusiastically chatted back and forth. Vision growing black, she managed to haul up the arm with her Pip Boy and…

“Fuckin’  _ A _ !”

… It came down on the teenager who was holding her with a loud “CLUNK!” He reeled back and turned her loose, grasping his head as the other hellions in his wake took a good, long second to figure out what they had just seen. Cassandra hit the ground on her knees, hard enough that she felt them bleeding beneath her suit. With a burst of energy she didn’t believe she could manage, she sprang up and away like an awkward gazelle, tearing toward an alleyway where she could see a point of light.

Heaving, gasping, panting, wheezing, she floundered her way ahead.

Then, something massive reeled her back. Something huge, something hot, something that smelled of copper and sweat. She screamed in alarm as an arm wrapped around her stomach and pulled her off of her feet, holding her so close that she could feel their perspiration dripping onto the back of her neck and into her hair. When she doubled over and howled, they doubled over on top of her, leg wrapping around her own to bring her to the ground.

Metallic air panted against the back of her neck, but when she looked over her shoulder, she could only see the reflective yellow of glass in a gas mask’s eyes. It was made of pure steel, though, and was rusted with age. A hood covered anything distinguishing that it wouldn’t conceal, leaving her completely in the dark as to who, or what, had a hold of her.

Pinned against the ground, she whimpered as she heard a deep, horrifying voice growl, “Do. Not. Move.”

She whined in the back of her throat and muttered pleas beneath her breath.

“Shut up. Don’t move. Hold out your left arm.”

Shakily, she obeyed. A notification popped up on her Pip Boy--something about a malfunction it had automatically corrected--and the green glow it created allowed her to get a better look of the mob surrounding her. They all looked so thin and desperate, but their expressions were damn near evil. They crept forward, inch by inch, ready to scavenge whatever leftovers the lion didn’t take for itself.

“And it works. How about that?”

Cassandra pressed her face into the dirt and sobbed as the monster reached over to yank her arm back for a better look. She bit her tongue to keep from crying out in pain.

“Stupid move coming out this way,” he continued as he threw her arm down. She curled it up underneath herself and whimpered.

“After all the times we’ve picked off you chumps from Vault 81, you’d assume you guys would get the hint that The Commonwealth ain’t no joke,” the teenager mumbled. She shook her head weakly, choking as she forced her mouth and brain to fall into sync.

“I don’t know what Vault 81 is,” she pleaded. “If you have something against Vault 81, that’s not where I came from.”

“Oh, please,” the teenager scoffed. “What other vault is around here?”

“Vault 111.”

Silence answered her. The grip on her loosened, if only for a second. As soon as she tried to squirm free he wrangled her in tighter than before. The others looked at each other curiously. First, they were bewildered, then amused, then absolutely giddy. It was like she had just told them the code to the gates at Fort Knox.

Then, a single voice called out: “She’s lying! There ain’t no Vault 111!”

A choir of muttering answered her, most of them in agreement. Cassandra winced as she felt herself being lifted up by the back of her neck, scruffed like a kitten. Her captor’s fingers tangled in her hair and yanked her head back as he guided her to the crumbling wall of a nearby building and slammed her chest-first against the bricks. She kicked, she wailed, but she didn’t have the energy to keep up for long.

“Well,  _ fuck me _ ,” the behemoth chuckled after a moment to examine her back. “You  _ aren’t _ from 81.”

She could feel him trace out the number on her suit with his finger, a shiver shooting down her spine with every touch. Three vertical lines, painfully slow and delicate. It was almost intimate. Fear spiked in her heart.

“Where’s this vault?” he demanded. Cassandra swallowed hard and tried to nod in the direction she thought was north but, realizing how disoriented she was, had to settle for using her words.

“North. Northwest. D-do you know where Concord is? I-i-it’s…”

“You walked here from Concord?”

He almost sounded impressed.

“F-from Sanctuary Hills. I-I’m from Sanctuary Hills up near Concord and the vault is--”

“Wait,” one of the other bandits chuckled. “What’s Sanctuary Hills?”

“A town,” she answered, voice high. “It is…  _ was _ a town before the war, and the vault is--”

“Before the war? The fuck kinda Jet you on?”

Cassandra bowed her head as they cackled in response, tears streaming down her cheeks as she felt the pressure against the back of her neck increase. It was gradual, but before long she could barely breathe. The monster just pushed her harder and harder into the wall.

“The fuck are you doing this far into Boston? That’s a hell of a walk for a dweller,” he demanded. Cassandra bit her lip and strained against his hold, but he was so large and powerful she doubted he even realized the resistance. She was a small, soft lawyer who was completely unprepared for the end of the world. This was a man honed by its horrors.

“Some people came into the vault and took my baby. I-I figured Boston would be a good place to start looking, and--”

Laughter answered her from all sides, except from behind. While the hyenas had a good giggle about the ridiculousness of everything she was saying, the lion loosened his hold enough that she could almost look over her shoulder to see him. Considering the fact his face was hidden, she had no idea what she expected to see in terms of an expression.

But his body language was different, looser. He almost seemed sad, though she knew it was likely her brain looking for hope in places where there was none. She watched as he slowly turned his head to his followers, almost like a mechanical doll, and cued over the two strongest with a nod of his chin.

“Grab her. We’re taking her with us.”

“We’re what?” the teenager asked. He was obviously shocked, and the sentiment spread through the ruffians around him like a disease.

“She’s going with us. We’re going to milk this bitch for every scrap of info we can about this vault. We’re going to butcher every last person in that hole and strip everything that isn’t bolted to the ground.”

There weren’t a lot of complaints after that, she noticed. Murmurs of disapproval eventually convinced themselves that this was a wonderful idea. Cassandra kept her mouth closed as she felt herself being picked up like a bag of laundry and tossed over the masked man’s shoulder. In her Pip Boy’s screen, she could see her reflection and the eyeliner smeared like warpaint down her face. She didn’t want to tell them that there was nothing left in the vault she came from except for a few oversized roaches and her dead husband. The longer she was alive, the longer she had to escape, as slim as her chances were.


	6. Chapter 6

She’d cried herself to sleep. Then again, he would have too if the situation was reversed. Caught in the middle of the night in some unfamiliar place, set upon by a pack of lunatics. Mishandled at every turn. Constantly reminded of everything they could, would, and  _ wanted _ to do to her. To make matters worse, it seemed like she’d already ran afoul of something earlier in the day.

Yeah, if he were a small, clueless woman being abducted by raiders, he’d cry.

Swirling his bourbon in the glass, he watched her in the corner where he’d had his men set up her cage. It was an old dog kennel he’d used when he’d had to quarantine one of his mutts, sturdy and small and held shut with a padlock so rusty that he had trouble getting it open with the key. By no means was it a comfortable place to stay, but the only other option was to chain her to the radiator and, personally, he didn’t like the idea of her having that kind of freedom. There were too many opportunities for her to take advantage of.

He took a sip, legs crossed beneath him and elbows resting on his knees. He watched as she brushed her broken hand against the bars and winced, too exhausted to wake up completely. Another sip, and he sat the glass down and forced himself up, bare feet padding across the wooden floor as he made his way to her side to take a closer, safer look.

The very first thing that had struck him when he got her into the light was that she was very clean. She had make-up smeared every which way and sweat that had built up from a day of hoofing it, but her hair smelled downright nice and her jumpsuit was still vibrant. Second, he couldn’t help but notice how small she was, something he hadn’t consciously realized while wrestling with her out in the street. She was short and thin and soft and warm, a far cry from the tough, lanky bastards he was used to running down in the alleyways.

Third, she was odd looking.

“Ugly” wouldn’t have been an accurate word. She was painfully average, though her face was a bit fuller than what he was used to seeing. The strange part was her skin and hair, which were splotched like a spotted dog. As pale as she was, there were patches of stark white here and there, the most notable being around her left eye. Some of her copper-red hair was bleached as well, with strands that were silver enough to kill a werewolf. In between these blobs of white were freckles, masses of them, that closed the distance, dancing across her nose and forehead. For all intents and purposes, it looked like somebody had chucked paint at her. He wondered if she was diseased.

Then again, he’d heard of what Vault-Tec had done at a lot of their installations. Their regional headquarters was a stone’s throw away and he’d been nosy enough to sit and read through their files when he was younger and had less to do. From coast to coast, north to south, that company had been playing god with thousands upon thousands of scared, hapless people. He’d read about cloning facilities, super soldier programs, and places out west where the goal was to trick terrified dwellers into human sacrifice. The idea of them doing something to a woman that would mutate her skin wasn’t too far fetched. In fact, it was par for the course.

He paced for a moment, floorboards creaking, and considered whether or not he should wake her up. His mind buzzed with questions that he wanted answered, and not all of them felt like they could wait. He needed to know about the vault, the defenses, the condition it was in, and her. How did she get out? How many people did she leave behind? What was worth taking?

Who took her son?

With a shake of his head, he thought against it and walked away. If she got her sleep and had a chance to calm down, whatever information he could pry out of her would be more accurate, more detailed. And once he got it out of her, he could get rid of her.

His stomach twisted. He told himself it was the bourbon.

Behemoth side-eyed his bed and decided against it, opening the door to his room quietly and stepping out into the spiraling hall. Late as it was, voices still chimed from every corner, and he could pick up the occasional snippet here and there. The words “vault” and “rich” were tossed around a lot, in between the sound of bottles clinking and Jet inhalers depressing. He hesitated by one room when he heard the word “bombshell,” and watched as one of his younger men detailed how personal he’d like their captive’s interrogation to be. When he noticed Behemoth lingering at the door, he stopped, knowing good and goddamn well he’d crossed the line.

“She’s mine,” he warned. The kid shrank into the collapsing chair he was sitting in while the woman he was chatting with let out a loud laugh.

He continued on. He wasn’t entirely sure of where he was going or how he was going to distract himself, even with booze in every corner and chems on every table. Running a hand through his hair, he groaned and stopped just short of the stairs.

“Trouble sleeping, boss?”

Behind him, a figure stepped into the hall. Lean and heavily scarred with his hair pulled back in a messy knot, the man dragged himself after his boss with a grin. The look in his eyes told Behemoth all he needed to know. He was curious and he wanted to talk, most likely about the Vault Dweller and what they planned on doing with her. Jackdaw had never been particularly good at hiding his thoughts.

“Adrenaline makes it hard to sleep,” Behemoth dryly replied. “I’ve been running all day today, unlike you lazy bastards.”

“That’s why you’re the boss. That sort of dedication.”

Behemoth’s brow furrowed.

“Okay, now I know you either did something or want something.”

Jackdaw closed the gap between them in almost a single step, trying to head Behemoth off before he could escape. With a flash of a rotten-toothed smile, Jackdaw bounced on his heels and gestured back over his shoulder at Behemoth’s room. At the Vault Dweller, just as he had predicted.

“Axle said the lady knows about a vault ain’t none of us heard of. And that we’re going to strip it clean?”

Behemoth nodded and pushed past him. As he descended the steps, Jackdaw bounded after him like a puppy, nearly taking himself out with his own awkward footwork. It was uncharacteristic--he was usually a far darker person--but either the prospect of wealth, chems, or some combination of the two had brought out the kid in him. It would have been endearing if not for the fact he’d simply had enough of the day, period.

“Woman also said she’s from some Pre-War neighborhood, so I don’t know how much weight I’d put into it. I’m interrogating her tomorrow when she wakes up, then she goes in the bay.”

“Don’t drown her immediately, boss,” Jackdaw protested, some seriousness coming back to him. He cut Behemoth off directly and scowled, though his eyes were full of confusion and disappointment.

“You want to tell me how to do my job now?”

“Don’t pull that ‘big, scary boss’ thing with me, kid. We both know that underneath that armor is some goddamn spoiled brat from Diamond City who;s just pretending he’s a big dog.”

“Oh, really? You have five seconds to get the fuck out of my way before I drag you outside and scrape your face off on the sidewalk.”

Jackdaw let out an irritated sigh and straightened his posture, trying his best to look Behemoth eye-to-eye. Considering the fact he already towered over him and was on a higher stair, the poor guy was craning his neck so far up that it looked like it would snap.

“Look. Okay, you’re tough. I get it. I wouldn’t be following your ass if you weren’t. But you’re stupid,  _ real _ fuckin’ stupid if you’re gonna question this girl and then kill her immediately. I mean, ain’t no denying she’s from a vault. She’s walks like a dweller, talks like a dweller,  _ looks _ like a dweller. Bitch didn’t even have a heavy rock to defend herself, so she obviously don’t know how the world works. And that number on her back ain’t no ‘81.’ We got one hell of an asset.”

Behemoth groaned, “How is she an asset?”

“Okay, look. We got a dweller who claims to be from some neighborhood we never heard of, next to some vault we never heard of, and she’s probably ain’t got the knowledge of how to live out here. We got this lady with all this information of fresh new marks rattling around in her head, marks that ain’t ever probably got got, and we have her under our thumb. And dwellers, man? They got knowledge, man. They’re smart. We don’t know how to hack security systems, but she--”

“She’s probably not all that smart. I’ll get the important info out of her tomorrow and then? She’s out.”

“You’re real short sighted, did you know that? Ever since Gloria and Lockjaw, you--”

“Don’t want to finish that sentence, Jack. You’re like a brother, sure, but a shitty enough brother that I will not hesitate to snap your neck.”

Jackdaw inhaled deeply and shut his eyes. His fists clenched and unclenched between half-finished gestures as he tried to pantomime what he wanted to say, but eventually even he realized he had gone too far. Shaking his head and stepping out of Behemoth’s way, he threw his arms down to his side and let out a defeated sigh.

“Yeah, that was a low blow. Sorry, boss. It’s just been rough around here. Folks are talking and, well, my position as your right-hand is about as compromised as your position as the alpha.”

“I’m not going nowhere and neither are you,” Behemoth reassured him, stepping past and continuing down the stairs. “The core is loyal, the rest is expendable, and the last mutiny was a cake walk. You’re fine. I’m fine. I know what I’m doing.”

“But if Lazarus…”

“Lazarus won’t do shit. That ain’t even a slight against her. She’s thrown in with us too much to jeopardize that, and she’s been at this game long enough that I know good and goddamn well she’s too tired to run two gangs. Seriously, we’re fine.”

Jackdaw nodded weakly and fell in behind him, following out of a lack of anything else to do. The longer they meandered downstairs in silence, the more Behemoth began to feel a hint of guilt for what he’d said. Sighing, he gestured over his shoulder for his subordinate to follow.

“If she says anything interesting, we may keep her. I just doubt she has anything to say beyond a vault location. Now, come on, jackass. Let’s go get tanked. It helps the nerves.”


	7. Chapter 7

Cassandra awoke to the sun in her eyes, raining down from between boards covering a shattered window. Dust floated in the air so thick that it almost looked like a swarm of angel flies, and the room itself was somehow both Spartan and a disheveled mess. Decor and furniture were sparse--a stained mattress, a weathered cooler, a radiator, and a steamer trunk that had seen better days--but the floor was covered in dirt and odds and ends had been thrown around recklessly. Empty bottles were piled in a corner, most of them alcohol, and cups and shot glasses lined the window sill and were cluttered on top of the trunk. Candles were melted into the floor, and a stack of tattered books practically built a wall between the mattress and a hole in the wall. An open first aid kit was just out of her reach, surrounded by old, discarded gauze and a couple of capless syringes. 

Covered in cobwebs in a dark section of the room was a pile of stuffed animals. Teddy bears, a couple of Jangles dolls in different states of disrepair, a purple sloth, a bright red cat. It was odd to see, beyond the fact that all of their beady little eyes were turned to face her. Her heart ached wondering what child was harmed by these monsters.

It was only after she was fully awake that she became aware of the bars around her, rusted and sturdy and held shut with a lock she doubted could ever be removed. Panic seized her as she slowly sat as upright as she could, careful to avoid brushing her injured hand against anything. As terrified as she was, she was groggy, weak, and still very much exhausted. Her body didn’t seem to have any more energy to spare on being afraid.

Instead, she settled for resting her head against the side of her cage and crying, if one could call it that. It was soundless, tears streaming silently down her face as she stared at the floor and the dirt and mentally screamed at herself. If things had gone differently, Shaun may have had a chance. If she had been a better mother, she would have had him in the cryopod with her instead of leaving him with Nate. That stranger would have shot her instead.

Nate would have been able to rescue Shaun. He was a war hero. He knew how to use a gun. She knew how to bullshit somebody for a few hours, and that talent wasn’t going to save anyone anymore.

After what felt like an eternity, she heard hinges creaking. Without moving her body, she lifted her eyes and watched as a trio of strangers filed into the room, replete with threatening postures and guns the length of her arm. It was as though they thought she needed to be further intimidated, as if there was anything she could do to them or any way she could resist. A sob threatened to escape, but she choked it down and blinked away the moisture from her eyes.

In the light, they looked different, more human. One of them she could even recognize as the teenager that had choked her and she was shocked at how small and defeated he appeared to be. She could make out bruises and scars running the length of his body and, being shirtless, she could count out his ribs one by one. He looked tired and desperate and almost apologetic. If he had been one of her clients, he’d be the type of kid she’d lose sleep to defend.

With him were two others, one that she didn’t recognize at all. She was a girl, young and gorgeous, with dirty blond hair and big, dark eyes. If she had been born in her era, she could have easily passed as a model, busty and curvy as she was. It was obvious that, in addition to being the most attractive of the three, she was also the least comfortable being there. Her expression, while stern, was so transparent that she could see through it to the other side of the room.

The last took her a moment, but when she placed him, she finally jerked upright. Her head hit the top of the kennel, causing him to smirk.

Tall. Broad. Probably bigger than any man she’d ever seen. If she had to guess a height, she wouldn’t have guessed any less than six and a half feet, and it was obvious he’d lived a life of hard physical labor. His hair--thick, dirty, and warm black--was partially shaved on the sides and held up in a strange, collapsing mohawk. Thick gouges carved into his left cheek and right through his brow, barely missing his dark, bloodshot eyes. Stubble lined his jaw, blending in with the grime that made his tan skin look darker. 

The armor was the same as the man who’d pinned her to the ground. The gasmask was gone, but god, it was the same evil bastard.

“Good morning,” the girl offered. Cassandra blinked as they began to walk closer. The two smaller, younger fiends placed their guns against the wall. The large one, who she assumed was their leader, clung to his like he needed to protect himself.

“It’s rude not to answer,” he growled, nearly pressing his face against her enclosure. Her good hand clung to the bars as she shakily turned her head to the girl and nodded a silent greeting. The tremors became worse when their boss began to shake the cage, knocking Cassandra onto her shattered hand.

“Answer properly. 'Good morning.'”

“G-goo-good mor… good m-mor…”

“Good morning!” he barked, his voice like a demon’s howl. She wailed and curled into a ball.

“Good morning!” she repeated, desperate. “Good morning _good morning **good morning**_!”

“Boss, come on,” the girl whined, looking at him pleadingly. “She’s not gonna be up for talking if you traumatize her.”

“She’ll answer me if she knows what’s good for her,” was the chilling response. “Sit up, Vault Girl. We need to have a chat.”

Slowly, trembling, Cassandra uncoiled herself. Fighting against years of evolution and survival instinct was exhausting, and by the time she managed to get herself into a seated position, she felt like she had run a full marathon.

The two younger bandits sat cross legged in front of her, as though this was going to be a casual conversation. Their boss paced back and forth in great strides across the floor. The girl raised her hand to offer a small, wiggle-fingered wave while her superior wasn’t looking. The boy shot her an incredulous look. As if on cue, the monster behind them stopped.

“I bet you’re wondering why we called you here today,” he began. There was amusement in his voice as if he thought there was anything funny about kidnapping a woman off of the street. Something dark bubbled up in Cassandra’s gut but the sheer terror she felt kept anything that could get her in trouble from coming out of her mouth.

“You should answer him,” the girl urged, flashing a tight, half smile. “Boss doesn’t like it when people don’t answer him.”

Cassandra nodded. She nodded, then nodded again. She looked up at their boss and nodded as furiously as she could ever manage, so much so that her head went dizzy and her neck began to ache.

“With your words,” the girl continued.

“Yes,” Cassandra whispered. “Yes, I want to know why you brought me here.”

“Because you came into our territory,” he responded, coming down to stoop to her level. “ _ My _ territory, flaunting your pretty little blue suit and fucking Pip Boy like you think you’re something else. Even the idiots at Vault 81 take their Pip Boys off before they leave so we can’t use ‘em to get in and fuck ‘em up, but you’re a whole other brand of stupid, ain’t you?”

Cassandra’s brows furrowed, the dark feeling intensifying.

“You look like you wanna say something,” he challenged. “Go ahead. Say it.”

“I just… I’m not stupid. I didn’t know it was like this outside of the vault.”

“Nobody in that prissy little vault warned you about raiders?” the boy asked incredulously, scoffing. “Really?”

“I don’t even know what a raider  _ is _ !” Cassandra replied. She was surprised at how indignant and angry she sounded, then reeled it back in just as she thought her captors were taking offense. Instead, they side-eyed each other before their boss broke into a smile. Whether or not it was plotting or simply amused, she didn’t have a clue.

“You… don’t know what raiders are?” their leader asked, finally settling on the floor between his lackeys. “Like, honest to god, no idea why you’re here or why we grabbed you?”

“N-no. I-I… it’s not like raiders existed before I went into the vault. It’s just a word they used for the guys Grognak fought o-or… I, uh, I honestly can’t think of any other context. S-some movies maybe.”

“Before you went into the vault?”

Now, it was becoming more evident that all of them were amused. Amused and, perhaps in the case of their boss, frustrated. She’d liked to think that years of working in law had made her an expert at figuring people out even when they wouldn’t talk, but rattled as she was and as unhinged as he seemed, it was proving difficult. He was impossible to read, his body language shifting all over the place, his expressions changing with every thought that flashed into his mind. 

The dark feeling was overwhelming. The stages of grief had skipped straight to anger, it seemed. Pressing her good palm against her eye and bracing her head up on her elbow, she let out a long, exasperated groan. When she finally found the guts to look up at her audience, they were staring at her with the same stupid stares as before.

“Yes,” she half-snarled, her voice still trembling. “Before I went into Vault 111. I know that sounds really stupid and unbelievable because, yes, I’m aware that the war apparently happened two hundred years ago, but I was frozen. I just defrosted. Some kind of malfunction, I think, because alarms were going off when I woke up.”

It felt odd hearing herself say it, especially so composed given the situation. Perhaps there was more strength to her than she thought. More surprising was the battery of reactions she got from the people sitting across the bars, ranging from pure wonder in the case of the girl to speechless confusion in the case of the boy. Their boss was the median, staring in stone-faced disbelief as though he were insulted by the fact she expected him to believe it.

“Frozen?” he echoed. “Like, you’re Pre-War and you were… on ice for two hundred years?”

“That’s incredible,” the girl gasped.

“That’s bullshit, Kitten,” the boy laughed.

“Bullshit or no, I’ll bite,” their boss continued. “You got any proof aside from the number on your back?”

Cassandra’s heart sank through her stomach. She looked at her Pip Boy, then him, then back at her gadget. Defeated, she brought it to her face and endured their mocking as she tried to use her teeth to navigate to any sort of screen that would help her. It flashed back and forth from a map to her vitals to a to-do list she hadn’t even thought of using. Nothing in its entire database seemed to reflect what had happened or where she’d come from. It definitely wouldn’t say who she was, considering she’d picked it up from somebody else.

She inhaled quickly and exhaled slowly, trying to calm her nerves.

“Not here, no,” she answered after a long silence. “But the vault itself, it  _ has _ to have information. I signed the papers. They had to file that somewhere. And there’s terminals. I know they were still working. It’s how the man who kidnapped my son opened the pods. You could find m-my name. Cassandra Fox. My husband’s name was Nathan, o-or Nate. I’m not sure what I wrote down. And my son…”

She paused, a lump growing in her throat.

“My son is Shaun. Shaun Fox. He’ll.... he’ll be listed, too.”

“The son you said was missing?” their boss asked. For a second, she could have swore she heard something human in his voice, but his eyes had nothing humane left to find.

“Y-yeah. Some man dressed like… dressed kind of like you stole him. Killed my husband. I-I have to find him. You  _ have _ to let me go.”

Both of the subordinates looked to their leader as he stared at her with an expression that suddenly looked haunted. They held one another’s gaze for a moment before he turned away and climbed to his feet, joints popping as he threw his gun over on the mattress in the corner and headed toward the door. His followers didn’t immediately fall behind him, exchanging knowing glances before the boy hopped up and took off. Wordlessly, they left her alone with the pretty little model, who looked at her with sad eyes and smiled. It was an almost promising expression.

“Lady, I think you just saved your own hide.”

Cassandra blinked, whispering, “How?”

“Don’t worry about it. It ain’t really important for you to know,” she nervously chuckled, before holding a hand to the bars for a handshake. “My name is Kitten. They forgot to ask you some things, so I guess I’ll finish this interrogation. Is that okay with you?”

Cassandra smiled, weak and weary, and accepted the handshake with her good hand. She wasn’t sure of how wise it was, but it was a relief to be spoken to like a human being. 


	8. Chapter 8

They called her “Lazarus” because she never stayed dead. Forty-five years old, twenty-seven of those spent raiding, and no matter how many times she was shot, forgotten, left for dead, or cut to shreds, she always dragged herself back. Behemoth had never met a tougher human being in his entire life and he doubted that, once her number was finally up, any one person would ever rise to her greatness. She was the epitome of the strength of a wastelander and the most terrifying presence that most Bostonians ever had the misfortune of meeting.

But, behind the bloodletting, arson, theft, and murder, Lazarus could be better described as the only family he had. She was like a surrogate mother, always there when he needed her and the only person privy to who he was at his core. She’d watched him grow up and, like any good mother, she instinctively knew when something was wrong. 

She eyed him from across the throne room as he lounged sloppily on his seat, eyes glazed over from chems and liquor and his gaze fixed on a severed head sticking from a pike on the wall. The jaw had decomposed to the point that it was barely hanging on, open in a silent scream. It was the most relatable thing he had seen in his entire goddamn life.

“What do you think I should do?” he asked. She shifted in his periphery, a lithe creature with narrow eyes and dark, shining hair. She looked up, face decorated in red paint and scars, and offered a pleasant smile. He could see her teeth, canines filed to a point, poking from underneath her ruby lips.

“This isn’t about what I would do, Diego. You’re a big boy.”

“Yeah, but if it were you, what would  _ you _ do? Jackdaw says drowning her would be short sighted, and Kitten seems to have taken a liking to her.”

“Kitten takes a liking to everyone. The only reason she’s in with you is because her initiation involved being on her back. I don’t know how she’s alive.”

Behemoth glowered at Lazarus. She wasn’t fazed. She continued to smile, pulling a small file out of a pouch on her thigh and going to town on her nails. If they were anything less than claws, she wasn’t satisfied.

“Kitten’s a good scout,” he defended. She nodded with an amused sigh.

“Kitten  _ is _ a good scout,” she conceded. “That’s beside the point, though. I’m not telling you what to do because I make bad decisions from time to time and I don’t want you blaming me. You and I both know what  _ I’d _ do, but Jackdaw may have a point. You’ve got something peculiar caged up in your bedroom. It’s touchy.”

“Peculiar?”

“Pre-war, potentially. Obvious vault dweller from a vault that’s somehow stayed off the radar. Of course, she told Kitten that everyone there was dead, but she also had to unseal the vault herself. That’s a good sign. It means nobody’s been there to loot the place.”

“No, somebody was definitely in there,” he argued, straightening his posture and knocking an empty bottle off the arm of his chair. “She said somebody stole her son. A fuckin’ raider, no less.”

“I don’t think a raider would lock the door behind them.”

“Then what? Whoever it was just materialized in there and poofed himself away like a fuckin’ magician?”

“Maybe. Or maybe it wasn’t a raider.”

With that, she put away her file and stood up, staring through the window and watching as clouds began to drift over the sun. She turned to walk across the room, helping herself to a bottle of half-finished wine that was sitting on a nearby shelf. Her steps were light but purposeful, her gait a mixture of class and power. Had she been born a few centuries before, he could have envisioned her waltzing around in a sequin dress as the ultimate  _ femme fatale _ .

She grabbed the bottle and settled against a table, fishing out a drinking glass from a nearby drawer. She smiled as she poured her share, watching each drop with an unhealthy fascination, before swirling it around and taking a sip. After a moment to let it flood over her tongue, savoring flavors the world would never make again, she cleared her throat and let out a wistful sigh. 

“You’re really stuck on the fact somebody took her son, aren’t you?”

He didn’t answer, instead turning his gaze back toward the head on the wall. Furrowing his brow, he stared dead into its one remaining, glassy eye and huffed. It almost felt like he was consulting a friend, even if the poor bastard had been anything but.

“You think it may be the same Gunner that took Gloria?” she asked.

“It might be,” he responded after a long pause. She nodded thoughtfully and polished off the rest of her wine before pouring some more.

“A Gunner might be more inclined to be polite if they weren’t planning on staying there, especially if they were planning to come back later. Close the door, leave everything untouched, take what you need, report to a superior. At least, that’s my experience with those gutless fucks. They don’t go out of their way to do more than what they’re commanded to do.”

“They’re the only ones who’d march in to steal a kid, too. Who else deals in slaves in The Commonwealth?”

“I can’t think of anyone. They have the market cornered. And, as a little bird told me when I was looking for your little girl, there seems to be a high demand for kids.”

Tough as he was, Behemoth felt a lump grow in his throat. He choked it down, just like every other time his daughter came up in conversation. Not a single ounce of him liked the implication of an uptick in child slaves, especially knowing what so many adult slaves were used for, but he tried to banish the thought from his mind. He had to tell himself his kid was okay, and that if she wasn’t, there would be a bloodbath at the end of the road.

Silence blossomed between them, the crackling of fire the only sound as Lazarus finished off the bottle and pitched it into the barrel. He barely noticed as the glass shattered and cracked from the heat, his mind abuzz with doubts and ideas. One moment, he thought he knew exactly how to handle the situation. The next, he had ten other plans and fears pop up in his head. 

On one hand, the vault dweller had knowledge he could use.  There was wealth in a vault that hardly anyone knew about, except some kidnapper and a couple of his goons. She claimed to be pre-war and, if she was, the possibilities were endless in terms of knowledge she’d have of places buried and forgotten, or how to operate tech that wastelanders had forgotten how to use in the past couple hundred years. Then again, she was another mouth to feed. Keeping her without being able to justify her presence could be seen as a sign of weakness and, if Jackdaw was correct, doubts were already in folks’ minds about his ability to lead. The money he could make selling her to his mortal enemies could help him take them down later, or buy back his daughter.

But if the kidnapping of her son had anything to do with the kidnapping of Gloria, could he risk it? The MO was too similar, with the theft of a kid, murder of a spouse, and sparing of a parent. 

It had to be the same guy. It  _ had _ to.

“Laz?” 

“Yes?”

“If I decide to keep this bitch to see what I can milk from her, and some of the gutterfucks downstairs decides that’s on account of me being soft, will you help me rip them limb from limb?”

Lazarus smiled and nodded, laughing, “We did last time. And you did the same for me this summer, remember? We’re  _ family _ , Diego. Besides, I live for purges. They’re fun.”

Letting out a sigh of relief, Behemoth stood up and clapped her on the shoulder. Despite the fact he was bigger and not exactly prone to light touches, she never even flinched. She just smiled that motherly way she only ever did when he was around.

“You’re the best,” he chuckled.

“I know, big guy. I know.” Lazarus dug out another bottle of spirits and winked. “That’s why I’ve survived so long.”


	9. Chapter 9

No matter how hard she tried, she couldn’t sleep. Despite the exhaustion, despite the fact she wanted nothing more than to rest, her body just wouldn’t allow it. Her hand, now purple, was so sore that she could barely think about anything else, and the cage was so cramped that every one of her joints ached. She couldn’t stretch, she could scarcely turn, and it was impossible to sit up all the way. Instead, she just tossed and twitched, occasionally beating her head against  the bars in hopes they’d either give out or give her a concussion.

The room was empty and only dimly lit, but through the crack beneath the door, she could tell she was far from alone. It seemed every few minutes, the shadow of feet could be seen, wandering back and forth. The silence was occasionally disrupted by laughter, breaking glass, loud cursing, and gunshots. If she was really quiet and the neighboring room was really loud, she could make out entire conversations between young and old, all equally malicious, as they told stories of things they’d seen and done that she’d never thought humanity capable of. 

With every tale, she wondered if it was even worth getting out of the cage alive. One girl bragged about setting a teenage recruit adrift on a raft of flaming mattresses, laughing as he drowned. Others used words like “mutant” and gagged as they explained ruined buildings piled high with bodies and chunks of flesh, muttering curses as they grieved for friends lost to the creatures. There was even some moaning, groaning, bumping, and gasping earlier in the evening that was apparently one of the women whoring herself out for drugs. 

Again, there was a mention of Jet. She still had no idea what that was.

Irritated, terrified, and agonized, she tried again to find a comfortable position. Lying on her side was uncomfortable, lying on her back was excruciating, and curling up on her stomach made her unable to breathe. If she placed her back against the back of the kennel, she could stretch out her legs almost completely, but that somehow made her knees feel stiffer.

As she struggled, she barely took notice of the door creaking open. When she did, she froze and watched as the massive man from earlier came stumbling in, back slumped and feet unsteady. She could feel his gaze rest on her for a moment before he started shuffling around like a zombie.

He was drunk, maybe high, and behind him was a silhouette she didn’t recognize from her capture or interrogation. Whoever it was was a man, far more sure-footed than the being that towered above him, though it was obvious he wasn’t entirely sober himself. There was just something uncanny and unnaturally fluid with his movements, subtly awkward and overly loose. She could tell from the way he closed the door and the way he seemed to float about the room in the candlelight, aimlessly pacing as his boss fell against a wall.

“So, it’s a team of me, Reese, and--”

“I’d spare Kitten, but we need her here,” the boss answered with surprising clarity. “Super Mutants are getting closer. We need a siren. You _can_ have Axle, though.”

“Boss, I don’t _want_ Axle.”

“C’mon, Axle ain’t that bad. He’s a good lookout.”

“You just like him ‘cause he kisses your ass.”

“I like him ‘cause I don’t gotta worry about him, Jackdaw. Unlike some people.”

“ _Look at me_. You’re, like… what? A foot taller and built like a deathclaw. Do you really think I can take you?”

“Guns can take down deathclaws, man.”

Cassandra watched as “Boss” slid down the wall, falling on his butt on the mattress in the corner. A hazy smile was plastered on his face as he looked up at the other man and, for a second, Cassandra braced herself for something inappropriate. Instead, she was treated to the sight of the second man--”Jackdaw”--collapsing awkwardly to his knees like a little kid about to play jacks. He snickered as his head dropped lower and lower until he was almost bowing to his boss a few feet away.

They sat and laughed, and Cassandra hated them because they could. Heat, like acid and burning sulfur, built up in her stomach as she glared daggers across the room. She hated them, and the fact that they could enjoy themselves. She hated them and the fact that they looked like human beings, because she knew they were monsters. She hated that they were free and didn’t have the decency to care that there was an infant out there, crying and alone in the custody of cutthroats. She just hated them, plain and simple, and if she could only reach a gun, she’d show them how deep that hatred ran.

Boss’ head swiveled to her suddenly and all of her fire was forgotten. After a moment of registering one another, a massive smile spread across his face, his teeth gleaming far whiter than she would expect for a man in his condition. Jackdaw turned, too, arching an eyebrow. The joy melted from his face and was replaced with something darker, though it was nowhere near as sinister as his superior’s grin.

“It’s the dweller!” Boss laughed. “Did we wake you up, beautiful?”

Her first inclination was to say nothing, but then she remembered Kitten’s warning during their good cop/bad cop routine. The monster didn’t like it when his questions went unanswered. Judging from the amount of blood she’d seen on the floor and walls while being dragged upstairs, she could guess he wasn’t the type to take offense lightly, either.

“I’ve been awake,” she croaked. She hadn’t realized how parched she was until she tried to speak.

“Can’t get comfortable?” he teased.

“N-no. Not really.”

“Welcome to the real world, then.”

She watched with horror as he pushed himself up to his hands and knees and crawled toward her, unable to get himself completely off the ground. Once he hit the side of the cage, he crossed his legs beneath him and braced his elbows on his knees, gawking at her like a bored child watching a zoo animal. Instinctively, she let go of the bars and fell back. Jackdaw muttered something behind Boss, but the monster was quick to shush him with a wave of his hand.

“That may be the last place you ever sleep if we find out you’re lying, so you better get used to it quick,” he chuckled, running a finger down the bars. “Jack here is checking up on your story, Miss… Fox? Was that right? Mrs. Fox?”

Cassandra swallowed hard and nodded.

“Cassandra Fox, that’s right.”

“Call me ‘sir.’”

“O-okay.”

His hands curled around the bars and gave the whole kennel a good, hard shake. She squalled.

“Yes, sir! Yes, sir!” she squealed. 

The shaking stopped.

“I’m gonna call you Foxy,” he continued, unfazed. “You are my pet now. Do you understand, Foxy?”

“Y-yes, sir.”

“And you will stay my pet, relatively safe, if we prove you ain’t a lying bitch,” he explained, before gesturing at the man behind him. “This is Jackdaw. Him and a crew are going to be using all that information you told Kitten to take that long, long walk up to Concord and find this Vault 111. If it’s there and we find evidence of you being honest? Congratulations! You won’t end up the sex slave of some scumfuck merc.”

He turned to Jackdaw, whose brows furrowed as he looked dead at Cassandra and added, “If you make me walk all them hours for bumfuck nothing, I will throw you into the fuckin’ bay myself.”

“Any questions?” Boss asked. Cassandra was surprised that she wasn’t trembling, but still found it hard to form words. Closing her eyes, she took a deep breath and shook her head.

It took a monumental effort to squeak out the words, “No, sir.”

“Excellent! Well, now that we’re on the same page, I’m going to turn in for the night. Long day tomorrow. I’m going hunting.”

Boss floundered to his feet. He looked to Jackdaw and, without even having to be told, the man scampered away like a frightened rat. Once the door swung shut behind him, the monster began to kick off his boots and peel off his armor. She turned away, completely disinterested and knowing it was only a display of power.  He thought she didn’t count as a human being, so why should he be shy? Before the war, she’d thought nothing about changing out of her pajamas in front of the dog.

“Hey, Foxy.”

She glimpsed between her fingers to see him standing there, half naked, head cocked to the side like a confused puppy.

“How long’s it been since you ate?”

It had to be a trick. Shrinking into herself, she mumbled a response under her breath that even she had trouble hearing. Boss slinked closer, more like a panther than a bear without his bulky get-up, leaning down against the bars with a curious expression. She could smell him, a disgusting mix of body odor and corroded metal, and she wondered how long it had been since he had bathed. Or if there was even a way _for_ him to bathe. Or if she would ever bathe herself ever again.

Probably, in a roundabout way, if they threw her in the bay.

“Sorry, Foxy. Didn’t catch that.”

“I haven’t eaten in two hundred and ten years. And two days. Sir.”

“Christ,” he chuckled. “I’m surprised you’re not feral.”

“Feral?”

“Like a ghoul.”

“A… what? S-sir?”

“Nevermind.”

With that, he padded his way back to his mattress and yanked up a dented blue cooler that had been hidden just out of sight. Lifting open the lid, he pulled out a can she recognized from when her husband’s mutt was still hanging around. The lettering, the colors; it was difficult to read but it was definitely Doghouse brand pet food, probably the beef flavor, and she didn’t even want to imagine how irradiated it was. Just looking at it made the jingle get stuck in her head, and she was equal parts horrified and nostalgic when he offered it through the gap in the bars.

She accepted it, of course, and looked down at the can in bewilderment as she juggled it in her one good hand. Just the idea of eating _dog food_ was enough to make her stomach turn, and she wasn’t all too fond of the implications behind the gesture. 

“Oh, shit. Yeah. Your hand.”

Immediately, he yanked it away, peeled off the top, and handed it back. She frowned at it, then him.

“Thank-you… sir?”

“Yeah. Whatever.”

With that, he stumbled back to his bed, collapsed to the ground, and half-heartedly reached into the cooler for his own dinner. She watched, tentatively dipping her fingers into the mush, as he pulled out another identical can for himself. Her stomach sank as she watched him pry it open, pop open a beer, and grimace into his meal.

“Did they ever make a flavor aside from beef?” he asked half-heartedly. Cassandra hesitated to answer, mostly because of the feel of the food in her mouth. It was slimy and cold and tasted repulsive, and every ounce of her was terrified that she would spontaneously die as a result. Radiation poison or botulism; one or the other would put her in the ground before that Jackdaw character could ever verify her claims.

“They made chicken, too,” she finally replied, gagging. “And liver, I think. Sir.”

“Fuck. Wish I could find something other than this shit.” He nodded to her and snorted. “Now, eat up. Gotta keep you alive until we find out if we have to kill you or not.”

She nodded and ducked her head, putting another pinch of the greasy, slippery meat in her mouth. If she held her nose and thought real hard, she could almost imagine it as something else. That canned Minnie Moore beef stew, maybe, or that horrible meat pie Ms. Rosa made for a block party potluck. Cassandra had forced herself to eat it so as not to offend, while everyone else in the neighborhood watched her in abject horror. She was the talk of the neighborhood for weeks and now, struggling to choke down ancient beef chunks, she wondered if maybe they knew something about the recipe she didn’t.

When she opened her eyes, however, the illusion was ruined. She watched as Boss finished off his meal, tilting the can upward and letting the scraps slough into his mouth. She realized, once again, that she was in a cage holding a can of beef Doghouse between her knees while trying to eat it with her nondominant hand. The aftertaste of two centuries of tin contamination burned the back of her throat.

And worst of all, if he was eating the same slop he fed her, that meant there really was nothing left. Things were worse than she ever could have imagined, and there was no way she’d ever go back to how things used to be.


	10. Chapter 10

Jackdaw had never been to Concord before, or really outside of Boston. There was one failed trip to Cambridge he’d taken with his old crew but, once they realized just how thick the ferals were within the barricades, they pulled out and left a trail of frag mines behind them. He only had a vague idea of what to look for, based on stories he heard from his peers or caravaners that had paid their dues. Map markers included the ghoul-infested city of Lexington and a wrecked train car full of power armor that nobody had been able to get open since before the world ended. Other landmarks were so tentative that he hadn’t even bothered to commit them to memory, since “skeletons on a car” and “giant tire fire” were things that probably had vanished with time.

The bright side was that the road was safe and the sky was clear. Marching in the rain would have been a goddamn nightmare with the crew he was given, since only one of them--Reese, bless her  _ entire _ soul--was worth half a damn. At least Axle was always willing to do whatever he was told, being the brown-nosing wimp he was, but the rest?

Their feet hurt. Their backs hurt. They were hungry. They were going through withdrawal. Walking for so long without stopping was hard. If Behemoth could have heard them, he’d have put a bullet in their brains.

Personally, the only thing that bothered him was his nerves. The further north they wandered the more abandoned it became, which struck him as odd once they got to Concord. Considering how little he’d heard of it, he expected some small, out-of-the-way place like a farming settlement. What he got was an entire goddamn town, complete with a towering church, a mostly intact playground, and a museum piled high with valuables and scrap. There were things like sleeping bags, lunchpails, and ammo boxes that were still full to the brim or recently used, untouched by dust with fingerprints still visible in the finish. It was like the population vanished overnight, and recently, which made his stomach turn into knots.

Kitten had said the dweller heard gunshots in the town and had refused to go any closer. He wondered if it was a ghoul attack and, if so, where the hell they’d run off to. 

The Red Rocket gas station up the road wasn’t any better. The place was trashed, like a cyclone had gone through it, and the entire building was infested with the worst case of molerats he’d ever seen. His heart sank when he circled around back and found a firepit, still warm, but no sign of a living soul. Again, it was like whoever had been there had simply disappeared off the face of the earth.

“Do you think it was The Ins--?”

“Don’t say it, Axle,” Jackdaw warned. “Saying their name is like inviting trouble.”

“Man, they’re scientists, not witches.”

“At this point, what they do might as well be magic. Fuckin’ warlocks, every last one of them.”

The only sign of any struggle was further up the road, smack in the middle of the street. In front of a collapsing bridge--just like the one the dweller mentioned to Kitten--was the body of a scavver in a ragged coat, rancid and squirming with bloatfly larva. Beside him was a dog, impaled with a tire iron, its eyes and tongue long since scavenged by other animals in the wastes. Oddly enough, there weren’t any injuries on him to indicate he’d been mauled, more than he just murdered his pet and dropped dead for no reason. Even if common sense said it’d be difficult to tell the cause of death with how badly decomposed he was, Jackdaw couldn’t get rid of the sick feeling that something unnatural had happened.

They tried to ignore it. Across the bridge they went.

It creaked and shuddered beneath their weight, planks cracking as they marched onward. It was the only sound for what seemed like miles, a haunting silence blanketing the area that he simply wasn’t used to. There were no crows cawing, no guns popping in the distance, or even the footsteps of scavvers trekking through the debris. Everything was so quiet, so open, and so empty, and the closer he drew to the next collection of houses, the more uncomfortable he became. It seemed like something was watching him despite the fact there was nowhere for anyone to hide.

Reese was the one who pointed out the sign once they hit the other side of the river, while Jackdaw was distracted by the eeriness of it all. Covered in vines and briars, partially obscured by ancient shrubbery, it stood proud with flowery lettering that was the essence of pre-war privilege. It said only two words, “Sanctuary Hills,” and Jackdaw felt a mixture of relief and disbelief when he saw it. 

There it was, just like the dweller had said when they captured her. It was where she’d been before the War, the place nobody in the entirety of their crew had ever even heard of. It was real, as real as Boston or Concord or everything he’d passed in between, and a flash of hope hit him like a brick to the head. Smile stretching across his face, he stepped into the middle of the ruined street and shook his head with an airy laugh.

“Holy shit,” he muttered under his breath. “She wasn’t yankin’ our chain.”

The excitement faded with time when the reality of what they’d found sank in. Just like everything else in that corner of The Commonwealth, there wasn’t a hint of life to be found. There was evidence somebody had been there once upon a time, but unlike Concord and the Red Rocket, there was nothing recent. The fire pits had burned out and there was an inch of dust on everything in sight. The road--a dead-end that looped around a small island inhabited by the largest tree he’d ever seen--was clogged with debris and valuable scrap, and half the houses were knocked clean to the ground. Those that stood had doors blown off their hinges, and he could see rooms inside with furniture still neatly arranged by the previous occupants.

Worse were the bodies they managed to drag out into the open. 

Every one of them was recent enough to be dressed in wasteland rags but old enough to have been thoroughly bleached. Some were behind barricades made of furniture that had long since rotted through. Inhaling deeply, Jackdaw could practically taste the death in the air as he clenched his gun to his chest and slowly worked his way up and down the cul de sac, pacing as if it would provide him with any answers. If anything, he only became more confused the further he went.

There was a skeleton on a roof, posed like it’d fallen out of the sky, with no way for it to have gotten up there. There were safes, easily opened, that were still lousy with chems and cash. Stashes of caps laid out in plain sight, and medicine and guns and anything an aspiring wanderer would ever need. Ashtrays sat on dusty coffee tables with cigarettes still balanced on the edge, half-smoked, as though the owner would come back any minute to take up their bad habit again.

The entire neighborhood was riddled with raw materials just waiting to be looted, but there had apparently been no takers in years. Surprising, because the place would have been a scavver’s dream come true. Everything from screws to copper to goddamn sheet metal laid out in the open, wasting away, serving no purpose aside from gathering dust. A man could build an entirely new town out of what was just corroding in the sun, but there it was, unmoved and abandoned. There wasn’t even a greedy ghost to give an appraisal.

Then, Reese found the basement. It was beneath a flaking house at the end of the road, built to withstand a nuclear blast and still powered after all the years. His stomach dropped when she began to toss food, purified water, and goddamn  _ gold bars _ out onto the grass, first with excitement and then with mounting concern. By the fifth bar, the two were exchanging troubled glances while wordlessly agreeing that the whole situation was beyond strange. 

Good loot wasn’t just laying around where anyone could find it. That sort of shit was usually in a safe behind three locked doors and a mob of creatures that wanted to eat you. It was the sort of stash you found because nobody else could safely get to it and lady luck, for once, was on your side. 

This begged the question: Who’d come in and leave behind skeletons and gold?

“Super Mutants?” Reese guessed, leaning against a post holding up a rickety car port. The rusted Corvega in the drive had definitely seen better days.

“Super Mutants wouldn’t leave so many bodies, and none of them in one piece,” Jackdaw replied as he stared across the street. The house was further proof the bombs weren’t the culprit, with a power armor station sitting pretty out in front, next to workbenches that he knew a pampered suburban mom wouldn't need. He chewed his lip and tried not to overthink it. 

“Ghouls?” she suggested, but Jackdaw shook his head again.

“No. Ghouls would leave  _ more _ bodies.”

“The Institute?” Axle piped, and Jackdaw responded with an irritated groan. Leveling his gun at the kid and scowling, he snarled, “I fucking told you not to mention those guys.”

“It could be, though,” Reese defended. “You hear what happened at University Point?”

“Goddammit, not you too!” he barked, loud enough that his voice broke the silence in the hills. It echoed like the call of a ghost and, suddenly spooked, Jackdaw lowered his gun and shrank into himself. They all sat quietly for a moment, waiting to see if whatever force hit Sanctuary Hills would come for them. When nothing happened, they let out a collective sigh of relief.

Until they heard the sound of propulsion jets.

Jackdaw was ashamed that he wasn’t the first to respond, watching as Axle unholstered his gun and whipped around just in time to see a glint of silver rounding the corner. Cocking his pistol, he waited and watched as a metallic object drifted lazily in front of them, almost jolly in its weird, robotic movements. It took a moment for them to realize what it was, and another for Axle to lower his firearm after realizing it wasn’t hostile.

It was just a Mr. Handy, dented and worn, with a piece of shrubbery clenched in one of its claws. Upon realizing that people were present, its mechanical eyes widened in what was either alarm or joy, and it wasted no time in swooping forward to greet them.

“Oh my! Guests! It’s been so long since we’ve had guests!” it piped, its arms swiveling excitedly beneath it. “I wish somebody had told me. I would have got the tea started.”

Reese cocked an eyebrow. Jackdaw, being the most senior of their lot, knew that he was expected to respond first but, in the shadow of an impending heart attack, he couldn’t immediately find the words. 

Instead, he just stood in shocked silence. Once the adrenaline began to wear off, there was a feeling of relief.  _ Something _ aside from bloodbugs and corpses existed to the northwest of Boston. Then, as each long second ticked past, his brain began to wander to darker places. While the Mr. Handy watched them expectantly, he started to become curious as to how the robot was still functioning when everyone else was dead. Dark scenarios played out in his imagination in which this polite chrome butler systematically wiped out the entirety of Sanctuary Hills. Maybe he even made his way to Concord, cheerfully malfunctioning his way through droves of the now-dead.

He’d seen it before, in old office buildings in the city. It wasn’t entirely unheard of.

Then again, it would be incredibly difficult for one Mr. Handy to take out a town or two. It was hard for a Mr. Handy to take out more than a couple of folks who knew how to shoot straight. The robot didn’t look particularly bad off either, compared to some of the scrapped and refurbished pieces he’d seen mercenaries and hobbyists run around with. He was dented, dinged, and a little dingy, but he had all his eyes and no holes in his chassis.

No. No, this couldn’t be the culprit. 

“Who are you?” he asked after a tense pause. The Mr. Handy whirred in excitement and tried to straighten its posture for a proper introduction.

“Ah! How rude of me. I am Codsworth! And you are?”

He watched, bemused, as it extended the one arm that wasn’t tipped with a potential weapon in what Jackdaw assumed was a handshake. Forcing a smile, he accepted while Reese and the boys giggled behind him. For a metal death machine, it had a very ginger grip.

“Jackdaw. Nice to meet you, I guess.”

“Jack Daw? Oh my, I don’t recognize that name. Are you a friend of the missus? From Concord?”

The giggling stopped.

“The missus?” he echoed. “Somebody actually lives here?”

“Why, yes, sir! Mrs. Cassandra Fox, criminal defense attorney for the offices of Selvig, Sacharski, & Fox! I sent her to Concord for help and… well, she should have been back by now. Am I to assume you are the help, Mr. Daw?”

He stumbled over his words, then looked back at his crew to see if they had any to spare. All of them were equally stunned. Reese’s eyes were as big as dinner plates. Axle blinked and blinked again, before bursting into excited laughter that was soon echoed by the remainder of the team. All of them realized, in one fell swoop, that they had struck gold in more ways than one.

“Of  _ course _ I’m the help, Codsworth,” Jackdaw answered with a mounting grin and a swagger he’d previously lacked. “Cassandra got herself a bit banged up in Boston, and so I came here to look for clues on her behalf. She told me about a vault nearby. You know, a place she was locked up? Was she actually…?”

“Goodness, you must mean Vault 111!” Codsworth chimed, as chipper as could be. “I dare say, how kind of you to walk all this way from Boston on her behalf. I was beginning to think that there was no common decency left in the world.”

The others began closing in, drooling like hungry wolves. Codsworth hardly noticed, his sensors focused on Jackdaw alone.

“Not a worry about that, big guy. But we’re a little lost. You think you can show us how to get to Vault 111? Don’t mean to be a bother, but we ain’t too well versed on this part of The Commonwealth.”

“Why of  _ course _ , Mr. Daw! Follow me, and I’ll get you there post haste!”

With that, the robot began to float away, not realizing that a pack of jackals was on his tail.


	11. Chapter 11

Sometimes, there were visitors. Some of them, Cassandra knew by name.

Kitten was a regular, sneaking away from time to time to hold actual conversations during her downtime. She was their lookout, and openly admitted that her gun was mostly for show. She was a criminal because she wanted to survive, not because she had a mean bone in her body. Not once would she explain how she ended up working with the gang or why they let her stay, but Cassandra was careful not to push too hard that it would make her uncomfortable with returning. After all, she snuck in food and water and was the closest thing to civil contact she had encountered since her last talk with Codsworth.

There was Crackdown, which was a dumb name for a dumb man who liked to shake her cage and make sex jokes. Antelope was an oddly nicknamed woman who was tall and slender to the point she nearly looked like a cryptid, which wasn’t helped by the way she’d run her knife across the bars of the kennel and laugh. Molly, Ginger, Tyson, and Sprain always seemed to come in together, and she only knew their names after they got chased out. She had no idea which one was which, especially since they were all men.

Then, there was the boss. She’d seen a lot of him.

Kitten called him “Behemoth.” It was an apt name, she supposed, considering he towered over the others, with maybe the exception of Antelope. She couldn’t tell without seeing them together, which she never had.

Behemoth was, for all intents and purposes, the ideal roommate. When his posse wasn’t around to scrutinize, he kept to himself in his corner and, when he did speak, he was surprisingly tame. There were threats, sure, but his tone wasn’t quite as angry as it had been when she first arrived, and most of them were mumbled under his breath in Spanish, which she was surprised to hear. She figured he’d be equally surprised to know she could understand him.

She’d gleaned a few things in her observations. He was good with his hands, for one, and a lot of his alone time would be interrupted by subordinates who needed him to fix something. Second, he was a worrier. A lot of his grumbling was less about murder than inventory; medicine, food, water, and pretty much everything else were, unsurprisingly, in short supply after a nuclear holocaust. He found most of his men frustrating but stressed himself sick over their well-being. 

Third, he really meant it when he threatened to throw her, cage and all, into the bay.

The more she observed, the more human they began to seem, and the more everything began to make sense. It didn’t mean she forgave them or liked them, but glimpsing into their behaviors and how they treated her opened up a door into the post-apocalyptic hellscape she now lived in. What she’d learned was that the world was dead in more ways than one. There were no rulers, no masters, and no laws. Every scrap was sacred, every tribe was for themselves, and everything she took for granted before the vault was the stuff of conjecture and fairy tales for what few remained. She was, essentially, a mythical creature in their eyes, but they were so hard-up for meat they were willing to skin her to see what they could get out of it.

“I feel like the Last Unicorn,” she caught herself joking to Kitten. Kitten hadn’t understood, because books weren’t anything anyone cared about anymore. She wasn’t even sure anyone still knew what a unicorn was.

It was strange, though, feeling that unique and out-of-place. She was a lawyer in a land without laws, soft in a sea of hard criminals, and full of knowledge that could have very well been considered the last remnants of a lost civilization. It was strange, and terrifying. The longer she sat and mulled it over, it became increasingly obvious that she was in no way fit to take on what she’d hoped to accomplish. Shaun was missing and she couldn’t even take a walk without breaking her hand and getting kidnapped. This probably meant he was gone for good and she’d just have to accept it.

That, and the fact she was now somebody’s pet. A curiosity. She would die in that cage as soon as they got bored with her, eating beef Doghouse.

“Stressed?”

The voice was new, and eerie. She couldn’t put her finger on why until she looked up at the doorway and saw a lithe, elegant figure leaning against the frame with ruby red lips and silky, jet black hair pulled back into a fraying bun. When she smiled, her teeth were like a vampire’s. When she waved, she had claws like a cat.

“You have every right to be, you know. If what you’re saying is true, you’re in a situation more stressful than most. At least we were born into this mess, and here you are. Surprise!”

Her final word was punctuated by spirit fingers and a tired laugh, her tone mocking. Striding into the room like a seductress from an old film, she ran her claws across the bars and squatted in front of her with a cocked brow. Eyes, such a deep brown that they were nearly black, shot a cold stare through her as painful as any bullet. Cassandra almost felt violated.

“You better be telling the truth,” she warned, wagging a finger in front of Cassandra’s face. “Because if you’re not, none of us are going to be happy.”

Cassandra swallowed hard. She nodded.

“You have nothing to worry about,” she squeaked. “I hope.”

“You hope?”

“With the luck I’ve been having, I wouldn’t be surprised if a sinkhole swallowed Vault 111 as soon as I made it past Concord."

“Honestly, given how wicked The Commonwealth is capable of being, I wouldn’t be surprised either,” the woman purred. “I’m Lazarus, by the way.”

Cassandra furrowed her brows, confused. The way Lazarus spoke, it was like she expected her to know who she was. A part of her was terrified that she _was_ supposed to know. Everything about the woman hinted at her being the type to explode for no reason, just like a villain in an old Silver Shroud radio drama, and she found herself nervously fumbling for words to explain herself. Her visitor watched, obviously enjoying the sight of a squirming captive, then reached through the bars and tapped her nose with the end of her nail. It was sharp, it hurt, and it spooked Cassandra into silence. Every muscle in her body tensed as they quietly regarded each other.

“Stop,” Lazarus stated. It sounded like a friendly suggestion. She knew that it wasn’t.

“Now give me your hand.”

When she raised her good hand to hold it out to her, Lazarus was quick to shake her head. Instead, she gestured at the one that was broken and swollen. Realizing what this likely meant, Cassandra hesitated. Lazarus, unfazed, continued to hold out her palm in a polite but threatening demand.

Eventually, she relented. There wasn’t really another option, considering what side of the bars she was on. Trembling and terrified, she gingerly squeezed her injured hand out of the kennel and watched, paralyzed, as Lazarus regarded the injury with a smirk.

“Who did you punch?” she asked, taking Cassandra’s hand in hers and turning it gingerly. White hot pain shot up her arm with every poke and prod, and it grew to an excruciating level as she began to probe her roughly with her fingers. Bruised and swollen skin seemed to devour her fingertips as she pressed past the puffiness and down to the bone, rolling her joints between her digits as she felt around for a weak point. Half way down her middle finger, the agony became so much that Cassandra swore she would puke, but she swallowed it as best she could. She didn’t like the idea of wasting what little food she was given.

“Wasn’t one of ours, was it?” Lazarus teased. Now that she found a weak point, she pressed harder, just enough to make Cassandra squall.

“It was a giant rat!” Cassandra squealed. She hoped that confessing would make Lazarus stop, but instead she doubled down. Every nerve in her body seized as she kicked against the cage and struggled to pull away, but for as thin as her torturer was, she was extremely strong. She grabbed her wrist and held her in place, free hand still searching for fresh injuries. She only stopped when she ran out of fingers, shaking her head sadly.

“You really don’t have a high threshold for pain, do you? Vault life must be cozy.”

“I wouldn’t know,” Cassandra responded, tears forming in the corners of her eyes. “It seemed nice before the cryopod. I wasn’t awake to know.”

“Pre-War life, then. All sorts of creature comforts, and from what Kitten told us, you were a woman of learning. Right? Pampered, comfortable. How often did you go outside?”

“E-enough. I-I… I worked a lot s-so I didn’t really have time.”

“You’re struggling to talk. Is the pain really that bad?”

She answered Lazarus with a furious nod, so strong it almost made her dizzy. Sighing, the raider patted her gently on the arm and offered a laugh that barely masked her maliciousness.

“Well, you’re going to really hate what comes next. Put your hand flat on the ground, if you don’t mind.”

“What?” Cassandra shrieked. Staring pointedly at her, Lazarus gestured at her hand, then the floor.

“Hand. Floor. Now.”

Resistance would earn her no favors. She had no choice but to obey. Sobbing in anticipation of what was to come, she struggled to spread her hand flat on the floorboards, like a bloated starfish basking in the dust. Lazarus’ smile fell as she stood and, as nonchalant as she had been during their entire “talk,” meandered over to the large, dusty trunk in the corner of the room. When she lifted the lid, the litter on top spilled onto the ground, and half of her slender frame vanished inside as she rooted around for treasure.

A cold dread built up inside of Cassandra as she watched, the pain forgotten when she saw the woman lift herself out of the box with a gleaming, oil-covered wrench in her hand. She didn’t have to say a word for Cassandra to know what was coming, but the cruel stare plastered on Lazarus’ face made it clear that retreat would be a bad idea.

So she sat. She waited. She watched as Lazarus settled on her knees in front of her and painfully spaced out her fingers so that she had a clear shot at the one in the middle. While she yowled and spit as she began to prod for the most painful point, she kept her hand as still as she could, lest the wrench end up being used to crush something more important than her hand.

“You said you punched a giant rat?” Lazarus laughed. The fact she was still trying to hold a conversation made everything more complicated, as Cassandra couldn’t focus on anything but pain. Sweat beading at her brow, she nodded weakly and offered a breathless, “Yes.”

“Like, a mole rat or...?”

“Mole rats… they aren’t as b-big as what I saw.”

“You don’t say. Are you sure you didn’t punch a brahmin?”

“Wh-what’s a brahmin?”

“You don’t know? I swear, the more you speak the more I believe that you’re actually from outside our time.”

Lazarus wound up her swing, taking a few practice swipes that always ended right before they connected. She could still feel the cold of the metal brushing against her skin and, each time, her heart rose further up her throat. Every part of her body tensed as she fought the urge to flinch. Closing her eyes seemed like the best solution; she couldn’t dodge what she couldn’t see.

“Hold still, beautiful.”

Pain. Nauseating, crushing pain. 

Cassandra’s chest tightened and a howl she hadn’t thought herself capable of flew out of her mouth, echoing through the rafters and probably the entire block. The crunch was enough to make her skin crawl, an electrifying and horrible feeling surging through her entire body and leaving goosebumps in its wake. She tried to pull away but Lazarus, as quick as a flash, grabbed her by the wrist and pulled as hard as she could. Cassandra slammed against the bars, kicking and screaming as she felt those clawed fingers probing diligently up and down her middle finger.

She heard footsteps thundering outside of the room. She heard a voice, deep and angry, yell something that she couldn’t make out. She felt Lazarus pull her injured finger, and could hear her click her tongue as she let out a long, exasperated sigh.

“Not clean. Hold on.”

Her finger twisted. Then, there was a snap. Lights exploded behind her eyes, vision blurring before fading to grey. The world ceased to exist beyond the sound of voices--Lazarus, and others she recognized--and the sensation of burning, throbbing pain.

“That did it,” Lazarus cooed.

Cassandra didn’t get to ask what “it” was. 

Her tongue flopped uselessly in her mouth. 

Her brain was a fuzzy mess. 

Her body slumped uselessly to the ground.


	12. Chapter 12

What was it like when the bombs fell? 

Jackdaw couldn’t help but wonder as sirens blared through the foothills and he stood beside the elevator platform, staring at the faint light emanating from the Glowing Sea on the horizon. Even though it was miles away, the walk up--brisk and haunting on the heels of an oblivious Codsworth--had painted an eerie, mortifying picture of the last days of the old world. While running across pre-war skeletons and ancient ghouls wasn’t uncommon while wandering through Boston, there was something different about the scene at Sanctuary Hills. Everything had seemed so much more desperate, as evidenced by the dry bones piled outside of the fence surrounding the Vault-Tec site, and he never would have guessed he could see so clearly to the impact site from the edge of the vault entrance.

And the equipment, it was all abandoned, untouched, and locked in the positions they’d been in before society ended. It was evident that nobody had been through the vault site since the war. Even the corpse of the man who sealed it was still draped over the controls, his remains held together by his sun bleached fatigues. Never before had he stumbled across a place that had been untouched by even ghouls since, in their desperation, most everyone had rummaged through every square inch of the Commonwealth.

Not here. Time had stopped. The people were gone. 

Jackdaw felt sick. He'd seen wreckage and bodies before in Boston, but this somehow seemed more real.

“I believe this is how she got out,” Codsworth explained casually, rolling a clawed hand at the gear-shaped hole in the earth. Lights, red like the eyes of a demon, flashed around its edges as its maw opened up like a great beast. Dust dripped down its throat as the sound of grinding metal became almost deafening. Reese shifted her weight uncomfortably. Axle tried to pretend he wasn’t bothered.

“I remember the alarms,” Codsworth continued, “which were most alarming, Mr. Daw. Oh!  _ Alarming _ ! I didn’t even realize I was making a joke.”

The elevator came to an abrupt halt at the top and Jackdaw watched as the robot hovered onboard. Inhaling deeply, he followed. His heart sank when he felt the elevator give slightly under his weight, and skipped a beat when it did the same for each person who climbed aboard. He would have thought that something so sturdily built wouldn’t feel as delicate and flimsy as an abandoned lift in a crumbling hotel, but when the sirens cut off and they began to screech downward, he realized he may have had too much faith in Vault-Tec and their machinery.

A lilting, abnormal voice--female, maybe, but nearly inhuman--began where the sirens ended. As they descended into a seemingly endless tunnel of black, it welcomed them to their new home while the teeth of the beast closed overhead. Once the only lights left were Codsworth’s jets and the sparks flying from the elevator, Jackdaw realized how small, alone, and terrified he felt. When they picked up speed, almost like the elevator was in a free fall, it quadrupled.

His mind wandered back to the girl in the cage in Boston. To the Glowing Sea, to the monotonous, robotic woman cooing at him from the darkness. A pang of pity hit him like a slap to the face. It was an uncomfortable sensation, to feel regret for something he’d done.

The first sliver of light at the end of the descent was blinding, despite being nothing more than dim fluorescent bulbs. Shielding his eyes, his knees nearly buckled as the elevator hit the ground and the shrieking of metal gates began to echo through the sterile antechamber. He almost missed the final words of the welcome wagon fading into the depths.

“Thank-you for choosing Vault-Tec.”

Then, silence. The sort of uncomfortable silence that Jackdaw associated with ambushes and ghoul attacks. Every hair on the back of his neck stood on end as he realized, with mounting concern, that not even Codsworth was speaking anymore. Still lazily floating in place, his eye stalks twitched nervously. There was something in the air, something unsettling, and even the bucket of bolts could feel it buzzing through the tomb they’d just broken into.

Wordlessly, the robot continued ahead. He was slower, cautious, and it was apparent he’d never set a mechanical arm in the place in his entire, artificial life. Up the stairs he floated, towards a gear-shaped hole in the wall, and Jackdaw nervously fell behind him. His subordinates followed in a single file line like children.

“It’s not as spacious as I’d imagined,” Codsworth finally said, breaking the silence. Jackdaw stepped up on the scaffolding at the top of the stairs and saw exactly when he meant. Everything was cramped and cluttered, the walls lined with techno-gadgets and the floors littered with the bones of the previous occupants. All of them were in lab coats instead of vault suits, which he found peculiar, and one of the bodies looked like it had been violently rattled apart by somebody. Or  _ something _ .

“It’s cold,” Reese added, sidling up to him and chewing nervously on her bottom lip. Her hands trembled both from fear and the chill, her shotgun shaking uneasily in her grip. Jackdaw hadn’t even noticed the temperature because of his nerves, but now that she pointed it out…

“It feels like fuckin’ Christmas in here,” Axle hissed between clenched teeth. Jackdaw nodded.

“Yeah. It is a bit chilly.”

“Temperature gauge reads it as a dreary thirty-six-point-two degrees Fahrenheit, unfortunately,” Codsworth piped. “Do make sure to bundle up!”

“With what?” Reese demanded, but the robot was gone, disappeared down the first open doorway he detected. Faster than before, the machine seemed to have regained his nerve as he jetted down the corridors and left them all eating his exhaust.

Jackdaw wasn’t as brave. The haunting silence had him on alert. Gesturing for his men to follow, he meandered behind, instructing the crew to keep an eye out for valuables while being too shaken to watch for anything but trouble.

The further they walked, the clearer it became that the vault was exactly like the rest of the northwest corner of The Commonwealth. It was a ghost town. The only signs of life dotting the corridors were carcasses of crushed radroaches and long gone dwellers clutching guns and stun batons. There was an overseer’s office with a flipped chair and a broken overseer sprawled on the floor, and an empty bathroom with medicine still in the cabinets and soap still in the shower. Living quarters were still neatly organized and strangely spared of decay, and when they hit the dining hall he was surprised to find a video game set up on a terminal with beer bottles neatly stacked around it.

It was like somebody was still supposed to live there. They just  _ didn’t _ anymore.

More startling was the fact that there were places where the dust on the furniture was disturbed, places where he could see the outline of items that had been moved after ages of disuse. Stimpacks, mainly, from the corners of desks and tables. Streaks from clumsy fingers and palm prints from desperate hands were left on dirty locker doors. Drawers were left askew, doors were left half open. Whoever it was had to have been a recent visitor, he mulled, as he marveled at both everything they’d taken and everything they’d left behind.

“My word! Mrs. Able!”

The sound of Codsworth’s shrill cry of alarm echoed through the nothingness and, instinctively, Jackdaw cocked his gun and bolted ahead. Everyone followed with the exception of Reese who, surprisingly was too stunned to move. Once she figured out what was going on, she readied herself, let out a battle cry, and stormed to the front of the pack. Jackdaw stumbled as she pushed past him, her boots clopping on the floor as loud as a brahmin stampede as she vanished around the corner. His lungs burned as he spurred himself to go faster, hoping to catch her before “Mrs. Able” did first.

He skidded around the corner, slammed into a wall, and then stumbled towards the only room with light. The floor was wet and slushy, slick and difficult to find traction. The further he ran, the colder it became, until finally he emerged in the middle of a dreary, frozen chamber. At the threshold stood Reese, gun slack at her side, and in the middle of the room was their escort staring solemnly at what looked to be an oversized casket.

Except, it wasn’t a casket. Jackdaw furrowed his brows, glancing from wall to wall curiously. Everything looked like something out of a copy of  _ Astoundingly Awesome Tales _ , shiny and alien and seemingly impossible. The “coffins” were large, rounded, with portholes in the front, and each one was connected to pipes that snaked up to the ceiling and across the walls. Massive tanks of  _ something _ , all of them too cold to touch, stood proudly in the corners like guardians. The path through the middle of the room was lined with keypads, but there was no indication of how they worked.

“Oh, Mrs. Able. How  _ could _ they?”

Codsworth raised a claw and hovered closer to one of the pods, placing it gingerly on the glass like a flesh-and-blood mourner. While the others broke away to poke and prod at the gadgets, Jackdaw slipped up behind the robot to see what he was looking at.

A corpse. One with flesh and hair, caked in ice, curled up uncomfortably just on the other side of the door. Beneath the layer of frost he could see curly black hair and pretty little features, a motherly face that looked like something out of an old sitcom holotape. He could imagine this lady in a pink floral dress serving cookies to neighborhood kids like in the old Picket Fences magazines he’d used for tinder in the past. Judging from how Codsworth was reacting, that sweet disposition probably wasn’t too far off.

“She was mum’s best friend, you know,” he sighed wistfully. “Always brought the same casserole to every occasion, but we never complained. We just politely tipped it into the trash when she went home.”

Jackdaw’s heart ached. There was something painful about the idea of a woman so pure that a machine grieved for her.

“Hey, Jackie Boy!”

Axle’s voice echoed across the room. Normally, the sound of the kid’s voice was grating, but in this case he was thankful for the push back to reality and the task at hand. Jackdaw spared one final glimpse back at Mrs. Able, the woman he’d never know, before he ambled over to the corner where his subordinate was hiding. He could only see his back, steeply arched, from behind one of the behemoth pods. The sound of clicking keys rattled through the air.

As such, it wasn’t surprising to find Axle hunched over a wall-mounted terminal, clacking away at the keyboard with his eyes transfixed on the bright green letters that danced across the screen. Once he could feel Jackdaw’s presence, he kindly scooched over to give the top dog some room. Despite being dazed by the heaviness in the air, he tried to focus on whatever it was that Axle was doing. Until he saw a list of names and numbers, he didn’t consciously realize that he was breaking into some database.

Or, was it a database? As Axle scrolled further along, he came to realize that it wasn’t just a list. The computer itself was hooked up to some kind of life support system, monitoring and evaluating every last pod lining the room and some that he couldn’t see. Each one was labeled and named, each person whittled down to being nothing more than an object to be filed, and it became very apparent after a moment that the system it was monitoring had failed.

Every one of the people Vault-Tec had stored was dead.

“Asphyxiation, asphyxiation,” Axle mumbled under his breath, reading through the error logs in each occupants’ profile. The others began to gather around out of morbid curiosity. When Axle’s voice faded, Reese took over.

“Asphyxiation. Asphyxiation,” she chanted, shaking her head each time. “Fuck, man. Vault-Tec did not fuck around, did they?”

“There ain’t no way this ain’t sabotage,” Jackdaw responded bleakly. Axle nodded in agreement and continued to scroll.

“One of them started waking up,” Reese sighed, “but, would you look at that? They re-froze the bastard and he  _ asphyxiated _ .”

“One pod is empty,” Axle added. “Guy didn’t make it in time.”

“And what about tho-- oh.”

Reese trailed off and Axle took a step away from the terminal. Everyone’s eyes came to rest on the last entry at the same time and they stood, awestruck, in the glow of the screen. Reese raised a hand to gesture but it was unnecessary. Axle opened his mouth to speak but it was equally pointless. Everyone could read well enough to see what they were all looking at.

“Pod C6: Nathaniel and Shaun Fox - Occupant status: Unknown. Pod door manual override engaged.”

“Pod C7: Cassandra Fox - Occupant status: Unknown. Pod door remote override engaged.”

After a few moments of silence, Axle giggled. It was a nervous laugh, the kind of laugh that came with disbelief and discomfort. Throwing up his hands, he turned and walked out of the room and into the cold darkness of Vault 111, leaving his fellows behind. Reese’s mouth turned into a scowl as she took his place at the helm, shouldering her gun and leaning towards the screen as if the words would change if she got closer. Once she realized it wasn’t a trick, she turned to Jackdaw and nodded in grim acceptance.

He knew exactly what she was thinking because he was thinking it, too. That this was unexpected. That they’d walked up north with the expectation of going back and making fun of a woman in a cage, but now they knew that everything she’d said had checked out. That, with the evidence in the Vault and the addition of Codsworth to muddle things, it was very unlikely anything was a lie. They’d found a survivor with skin, somebody’d who’d been locked in an ice chest for two centuries, and somebody who honestly had no idea why she was grabbed off the street, how the world had changed, and could remember the blast that ended the world like it was yesterday.

Because, to her, it  _ was _ yesterday.

“Is it just me, or do you suddenly feel really bad about all this?” Reese asked. Jackdaw slowly nodded.

“You could say that.”

“I mean… I guess she could, I don’t know, have stumbled across the real Cassandra and stole her identity, but…”

Their gaze drifted towards Codsworth as he hovered down the path. Once he hit the end, between two open pods that capped the aisles, he raised up his metal arms in alarm and let out a series of distressed sounds that strained his voice module.

“Sir!” he shrieked.

They watched as he reached gently into one of the pods and, at the slightest touch, a body sloughed into the floor. Soaking wet and still crusted with ice, it pooled into a mess beneath him. A freezer burnt head, bright red and beginning to turn black, lolled in their direction. A third, empty eye had been recently added right in the middle of his forehead. The expression was still angry, defiant on a face that had once been the sort of handsome that The Commonwealth just didn’t see anymore.

Jackdaw watched as Codsworth raced from the room in a tizzy. He looked at the markings on the floor in front of each pod, labeling them by number, and counted down in his mind to where the body was. No matter how many times he counted and recounted, it was always the same: Pod C6, Nathaniel Fox. And Shaun.


End file.
